Avaya Goes Full Throttle on CCaaS and CX in the Metaverse

Gitex 2022 offered the platform for Avaya to showcase its CCaaS progression and latest innovations

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Avaya Goes Full Throttle on CCaaS and CX in the Metaverse
Contact CentreNews Analysis

Published: October 11, 2022

Charlie Mitchell

“We’ll remember Gitex 2022 as the year that CCaaS really showed up for Avaya, in a big way,” says Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research.

Indeed, Avaya OneCloud CCaaS has come of age since Gitex 2018, when the vendor first launched the platform.

At the time, the solution was in its infancy, not available everywhere, and voice-only.

Fast-forward four years, and the offering is much deeper, with the Avaya OneCloud suite at the forefront of the vendor’s battle to make more headway into the SaaS market.

Now, it offers an array of channels and many supplementary tools, which will help to build confidence in cloud migration across its extensive on-premise customer base.

Of course, Avaya is later to the game than many of its CCaaS competitors. Yet, talking to its CCaaS customers at Gitex 2022, Kerravala noted that many seemed to single out the solution’s extensibility as a significant strength. He said:

No two customers are the same. So, with every deal – even with a SaaS offering – you will want to do some customization. And the customers I’ve talked to say it is very easy to work on top of Avaya CCaaS and use APIs to do lots of truly innovative things.

The vendor is also building momentum around its Avaya Experience Builders initiative, which offers developers a framework to craft new solutions in the cloud and “tap into endless opportunities.”

Such offerings have enabled Avaya to close the CCaaS gap. Moreover, Kerravala believes that the vendor’s late entrance into the space could prove beneficial in the long run.

“Sometimes being late to market isn’t such a bad thing,” said Kerravala. “Think about how much technology in the cloud has changed, from the first versions of CCaaS – when we had monolithic stacks of software.

Now, lots of vendors are having to rebuild their product to be cloud-native, whereas Avaya started with a blank slate and is able to build on its cloud technology. So, that should give them an advantage moving forward.

Avaya Teams Up Avanza Solutions to Deliver a New Metaverse Experience

In addition to beating the CCaaS drum, Avaya grasped Gitex 2022 as the ideal opportunity to exhibit its latest metaverse use case.

Working with Avanza Solutions, the vendor showcased a digital twin of process businesses follow to come and open up shop in Dubai.

Such a task is non-trivial. It involves looking into the real-estate, applying for permits, completing VISA processes. These steps – alongside others – can take months, if not years.

Now, Avaya and Avanza are enabling people to do it all in the metaverse.

If they have a problem, users can speak to a metaverse agent – harnessing the Avaya CCaaS product – who will support them through the process and remove layers of complexity.

“I think that is something all governments should be looking at,” added Kerravala. “Here in Dubai, the government is very forward-thinking and the public sector drives a lot of innovation… I think this use of the metaverse is very creative and innovative.”

The innovation also underlines Avaya’s intent to deliver more immersive customer experiences, which Ahmad Dorra, CX Solutions Lead at Avaya, was keen to highlight.

“We are creating new touchpoints for consumers to interact with organizations,” he stated. “When a customer jumps into the metaverse and needs some support, then immediately we can trigger the best available agents to come into the metaverse and start helping the customer.

Through talking, collaborating, sharing documents, and much more, customers can complete full transactions in the metaverse.

Waqas Mirza, CEO of Avanza, joined Dorra for the following interview, which delves deeper into the new metaverse solution.

Delivering on Its “Innovation without Disruption Promise”

The new metaverse offering is an excellent example of new Avaya CEO Alan Masarek’s promise for innovation without disruption.

As are the wealth of partnerships Avaya showed off at Gitex.

Uniphore is one particularly exciting example, as a cloud-native conversational AI company that treats the software as a platform.

Last year, the vendor acquired Emotion Research Lab and now offers facial recognition and motion detection software – which may pave the way for more innovative bots and new forms of contact center analytics.

Verint and Alcatel-Lucent also supported Avaya at the event, each a prominent contact center vendor that can add considerable weight to Avaya OneCloud CCaaS.

Taking note of this, Kerravala adds:

I like the partnership model for Avaya because – while they are a big company – they’re not a web scale giant. So, to keep up with a lot of the bigger companies… bringing in some of these best-of-breed vendors will help them deliver some great innovation to their customers very quickly.

In accelerating its innovation cycle, Avaya seems to be proving its detractors wrong, with some placing doubt on its innovation without disruption strategy.

Yet, these latest developments will perhaps offer more peace of mind to Avaya customers that the vendor can support their organizations well into the future.

 

 

CCaaSConversational AI

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