“Avaya sees automation and AI-enabled customer engagement taking centre stage”

Avaya is a global leader in solutions to enhance and simplify communications and collaboration. The company is reimagining digital communications with innovation that defines the future of work and the customer experience. Along with a vast portfolio in areas such as Unified ommunications and Contact Centre, Avaya’s areas of expertise also include Cloud, multi-channel, Data/ Contact center, Analytics & Artificial Intelligence. Listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), Avaya is shaping what is next for the future of work, with innovation and partnerships that deliver game-changing business benefits.

Keeping up with the momentum during the challenging times of COVID-19, Avaya Spaces, which already helped over 2 million people work remotely, also played a significant role in the education and the healthcare sectors. The organisation is now looking forward towards strengthening its business in India by offering a range of operational, consumption and commercial models, with the entire portfolio deployed in the cloud, including subscription and managed services, as well as Avaya’s private and public cloud offerings.

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In a free-flowing discussion with Adgully, Adarsh Kaul, Marketing Head, Avaya India, speaks at length about their various marketing initiatives and how as an organisation they quickly adapted with technology and reinvented themselves to address their customer grievances and provided them the right business solutions.

You work closely with many contact centres. When the pandemic disrupted the world, how did you help your clients to navigate the situation and bring back some normalcy for your clients to stay connected with their customers?

The biggest shift caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 was that the world took to remote working. Businesses such as BPOs underwent a major change as their buildings were shut down, and therefore, the entire business moved to virtual. Since customer care centers were not able to perform due to the pandemic and lockdown, Avaya immediately enabled calls to be taken across. While the overall process sounds simple, it was indeed a challenge as we had to enable the calls, ensuring they were secured and no communication was disrupted. We not only had to create a secure network, but we also had to following the strict COVID-19 protocols. In addition, Avaya offered over 1.5 lakh free Avaya Spaces licenses to its customers to make their transition from a traditional working environment to work from home seamless. With Avaya’s OneCloud, we took our first step to enable working of first level of interaction without disruption, that is, BPOs and customer care. The next step taken by us was to migrate the IVR systems, where all of it became self-service based on voice and chatbots. Also, automation was built in contact centers so that the customer felt connected. These were the two major steps that we took at a record-breaking speed, along with creating secure product lines. Lastly, we also integrated them into our backend systems. Almost 90% of the contact centers who are using Avaya’s solutions are remotely working from home and are secured.

Customer centricity is the backbone of any brand or organisation. What kind of trends did you notice during the pandemic and how did Avaya India’s product offerings help many of its customers to stay relevant during these times?

For every organisation, ‘Customer is King’ and the customer should be able to communicate with the organisation. A huge trend that we have observed in the new normal is the shift from the voice-only channel – while it continues to be important – to digital becoming the main connect for the organisations. Therefore, Twitter remarks, Instagram DMs, emails – all of that became a huge trend, bringing the entire shift across the digital transaction into play. Digital here refers to automated chatbots, automated voicebox, automated IVRs, etc., so majority of the load has been taken up by machine tools rather than agents. If you look at it from a marketing perspective, most of the campaigns that were done earlier had a toll-free number, but during the pandemic even they were not working. The customer now faces multiple channels (chat, voice and the system), which capture the information and pass it down to whoever is the concerned authority. These are the innovations that we were a part of. While we had these products earlier as well, we have completely adapted our customers to these solutions and have them sorted.

There has been a major shift in consumer behaviour during the pandemic times. How has your technology helped to counter the new challenges and bring in efficiency to manage the customers?

With customers moving to digital, the human part of the connections has been replaced by digital interventions. In reference to the same, we have already created video customer care centers, including full usage of Avaya Spaces from an automation perspective. There is also a need to focus on aspects such as how customers need to be reached out, what we have been able to achieve and if a customer can connect with an organisation, if not through voice, then any other medium. We at Avaya, are trying to talk the digital language through chatbots, voice biometrics, and everything to do with machine learning or where AI has come to the front.

Collaborating with teams has been a challenge in the WFH era. How are some of your networking products on the cloud helping in working seamlessly? Have you introduced any innovation in your products here?

Businesses had to quickly adapt to the shifting scenario as the world moved toward a remote working model. While large enterprises were able to make this transition rapidly without much hassle, SMBs made their paved their way towards cloud adoption more gradually, but progressively. Avaya recently announced new features for Avaya Spaces, a modern workstream collaboration (WSC) platform that provides advanced UCaaS (Unified Communications) capabilities via the user’s selected device. Avaya Spaces may now extend existing on-premise calling technologies with AI-enhanced meetings and simplified, integrated voice and video calling powered by Avaya OneCloudTM CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service).

The platform, which was named a Strong Performer in Frost & Sullivan’s Frost Radar for Cloud Meetings and Team Collaboration Services 2020 report, changed the lives of many people during the pandemic’s worst days last year, allowing over 2 million people to work remotely without interruption. The multi-experience collaboration tool, which was first introduced in India early last year, has seen extraordinary global growth of 3000 per cent. Avaya’s collaborative conferencing and chat solution is designed to meet the demands of non-profits and educational organisations.

Marketeers today are very keen to embrace technology to bring in effectiveness, impact and cost control. What has been Avaya’s role here as a technology solutions provider?

Automation of emails being sent out, location-based marketing, using account-based marketing, etc., are all a part of the new concept – Martech, and ways of catching up with the millennials and GenZ audience. In majority cases, a brand reached out to its target audience through WhatsApp, Instagram and other applications. Martech has backend support, so from a B2B or B2C space, capturing customer experiences is still something that we control. Getting response feedback across all these campaigns, which are being done by new Martech tools, is something that Avaya does for a living. All the digital responses come through digital channels of Avaya and converge at our systems. We have enabled our product line to completely capture the responses from multiple channels and reach the contact center agent’s dashboard, which is followed by funnelling the ideas for the marketing. Therefore, that entire evolution is something that Avaya has absolutely gone across and captured efficiently.

Today, everybody has to manage huge data of their customers. What are some of the future trends in technology that you expect to manage customer data? How are AI and ML helping in enhancing customer experience?

The pandemic has aided in the adoption of cutting-edge collaborative tools and accelerated digital transformation across industries. Business continuity has emerged as a crucial factor as a result of this digital transformation. Cloud-based technologies, artificial intelligence, data centres, remote working practices, digital interactions, the contactless society, and cybersecurity are all growing trends that will help businesses integrate technology while cutting costs in other areas. Businesses will look for a well-coordinated communications strategy supported by intelligent integrated communications systems. Digital channels will become increasingly prevalent in many facets of our lives. This includes digital buying and selling, connecting with customers via chatbots and automated voice assistants, and holding remote meetings. As technology changes the way people communicate, the rise of a contactless society will increase this. In the healthcare industry, telemedicine will grow more popular, and it will integrate far more technology than in the past. The BFSI industry will experience a massive digital revolution, with items spanning from digital payments (UPI/ Digital/ Virtual money) to digital interactions with clients.

As India develops as a mature UCaaS and CCaaS market, we see automation and AI-enabled customer engagement taking centre stage. In an ever-changing environment, the goal is to constantly enhance the customer experience and predict customer needs. And the architectures of UCaaS and CCaaS solutions make it possible to use powerful AI-based tools to accomplish this.