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Future of Customer Service: Avaya’s Unified Approach and Innovations
Can enterprises truly achieve in-year ROI from their CX investments through AI integration? Join us as we uncover the future of customer experience with Avaya's experts, Jay Patel and Giselle. They shed light on the critical importance of a unified view of customer interactions to enhance user and brand experiences. We also discuss insights from Avaya Engage, where customers like Access Bank share their innovative approaches to customer service. Learn how the shift from understanding to implementing innovation without disruption is reshaping the CX landscape.
Explore the latest AI trends transforming customer experience, from the integration of Verint's workforce management to leveraging Google's AI capabilities. Jay and Giselle discuss the shift from reactive to proactive customer interactions, the democratization of AI, and the cautious yet innovative application of Generative AI for internal efficiencies. Discover the emphasis on employee experience amidst these advancements and the evolving landscape of CX metrics and KPIs. We also delve into the strategic shift towards flexible, scalable cloud deployment solutions, ensuring cost-effectiveness and the integration of best-of-breed capabilities to meet diverse customer preferences.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Can enterprises truly achieve in-year ROI from their CX investments through AI integration? Join us as we uncover the future of customer experience with Avaya's experts, Jay Patel and Giselle. They shed light on the critical importance of a unified view of customer interactions to enhance user and brand experiences. We also discuss insights from Avaya Engage, where customers like Access Bank share their innovative approaches to customer service. Learn how the shift from understanding to implementing innovation without disruption is reshaping the CX landscape.
Explore the latest AI trends transforming customer experience, from the integration of Verint's workforce management to leveraging Google's AI capabilities. Jay and Giselle discuss the shift from reactive to proactive customer interactions, the democratization of AI, and the cautious yet innovative application of Generative AI for internal efficiencies. Discover the emphasis on employee experience amidst these advancements and the evolving landscape of CX metrics and KPIs. We also delve into the strategic shift towards flexible, scalable cloud deployment solutions, ensuring cost-effectiveness and the integration of best-of-breed capabilities to meet diverse customer preferences.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody, Really intriguing discussion today around navigating the future of customer experience, something Avaya knows a lot about. Folks, how are you?
Speaker 2:Great.
Speaker 1:Great. How are you, evan? So many topics to discuss and follow up on Before that. Maybe some introductions are in order. Jay, if you could introduce yourself, maybe your team within Avaya and your mission.
Speaker 2:Yeah, hi, this is Jay Patel. I run product management with Avaya, our objective is to deliver the best products that our customers look for that can really drive their business forward.
Speaker 1:Fantastic and Giselle yeah, if you could introduce yourself. Yeah, sure, you're on another side of the world, so thanks for joining.
Speaker 3:No, a pleasure. It's good to see you, Evan, so I look after product marketing MVP.
Speaker 1:Product marketing at Avaya and our mission is really to not only for the products to be the best products with Jay, but to also articulate to the customers how those products bring value and outcomes to them. Well, such a great topic and Avaya Engage was so informative, so insightful. So many questions I want to follow up on. Let's start with Jay. You know there were so many of our customers there hundreds in fact and they shared a lot. What were some of the opportunities? And let's start with challenges. Those enterprises shared with you around their customer experience plans.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you. Customer experience plans yeah, thank you. And one of the things I heard was quite different this time around was a lot of our customers were looking to deliver a return of investment for all of their CX investments. They're being asked by their leadership how can you really show progress and impact on improving other CX or driving business results, but really trying to drive it? And an interesting kind of tidbit I've heard is more about in-year ROI returns for many of those CX investments, and many of those come around from AI. They're looking at how can I bring AI to help drive some either better insights on data or having unified view of my customer to be much more efficient and drive a better customer experience. And you know, really this kind of works well with kind of the advice strategy around innovation without disruption. We believe customers can take advantage of the investments they've already made and really drive some quick returns and quick improvements that can really help drive those in-year ROI benefits that they're looking for.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's a great, great point, giselle. I guess you'd echo that. But what else did you hear around challenges from customers, where you know they have a lot on their mind?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. I mean certainly, we heard the same things. I heard the same things that Jay heard, but what was really interesting for me this year was that the question shifted from last year. So last year we talked about innovation without disruption and the customers were asking us, what is it? And this year they were asking us, how can I implement it? What does it mean for me? And one specific thing and one specific ask or challenge that we were hearing and we were answering actually through demos, through sessions, through conversations, is how can I keep what I have? How can I start innovating without ripping and replacing? How can I maintain what works for me and bring in and experiment in new technology and bring in AI use cases into my ecosystem to drive different values and different outcomes, really depending on different customers.
Speaker 1:That's a great takeaway, and I think the question now is how are they addressing these challenges within their current strategy? You know, give us a peek Jay. I mean, how are companies using customer experience, employee experience, tools to accelerate business growth? It's a challenging time, time doing more with less. What are they telling you and what did you hear at Engage?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it really comes back again to that unified view of that customer. You know we've had so many issues where you know a customer may call in a brand and the brand doesn't really have a clear view to give that agent a historical context of all those interactions that that agent, that customer, has had with that brand. It can become a very frustrating user experience but also for the brand itself. They don't have a single point where they see all the touch points, all the interactions that they've had with that customer so they can analyze that to determine what can we do better to kind of get that. And that's one of the kind of areas that we got a lot of positive feedback on and some of the capabilities we're delivering of bringing a unified customer journey, bringing unified reporting, all the capabilities that can let a brand kind of really understand what's going on from a CX experience point of view and then start optimizing it and the other areas that we you know a lot of the customers were struggling.
Speaker 2:As Giselle said, you know AI is a hot buzzword. They're all being pressured by their you know, their management team. So what can you do to improve efficiency or productivity? And this is really what we show to engage. How can you start? And it's really not that hard. We've got a lot of capabilities, a lot of tools that can take advantage of the things you have and very quickly bring in just very simple kind of use cases like summarization and wrap up or self-service, trying to contain some of these issues. Let the customers serve them themselves and really leave those agents for the really most problematic types of issues that require that human intervention.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's such a great point, and at Engage there were so many interesting anecdotes and stories customers right on stage sharing their stories. It was really compelling, giselle. Any other examples or success stories that still ring in your mind?
Speaker 3:I mean, we've had really the pleasure to speak to a lot of of our customers and it's always, it's always a learning, it's always a discovery talking to the customers and going through their day-to-day and their challenges. One example comes to mind to add to to jay's example is access bank. So access bank, who is a leading bank, the third largest bank in the world based on financial transactions they're innovating customers. They clearly want to innovate to better serve their customers, to create better customer experiences, but also they're looking at their employee experiences. They want to adopt new technology, but what they have is, quote-unquote, too risky to change. They want to maintain it and they're actually quite happy with what they have, what's existing.
Speaker 3:They clearly are interested in AI use cases. So, in addition on adding new touch points like video banking and to their ecosystem of channels, they have identified specific AI use cases focused on the customer engagement side, so like chatbots and AI workflows to accelerate the responses to the customers, but also, to Jay's point, to elevate some workload from the agent side and to allow the agents to focus on more high-value interactions in person. And the innovation without disruption approach that they took with us through Avaya Experience platform not only resonated with them, but allowed them to keep what they have, to innovate at their pace, to decide when they want to move specific portions of their environment to the cloud and what they keep on-prem, and to operate on a hybrid mode, accelerating their business outcomes. Many other examples I have in mind, but I think that this is one of the examples that speaks directly to the approach that resonated with one of our customers.
Speaker 1:Really well said. And the other thing I took away from Engage was the really the committed roadmap that I saw in the roadmap section. You know the highlights features, so many benefits that you're investing in. Maybe give us a summary, summarize the highlights from that roadmap session and what can customers and partners kind of look forward to?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great. I mean, yeah, we're really excited and proud about the roadmap that we're delivering. You know, number one kind of the biggest area of focus is really going to be around orchestration. We really believe kind of enabling our customers to be able to route that customer interaction to the right place to solve that issue is a key asset or a capability that Avaya needs to bring. As part of that, we announced an acquisition company called Edify, which will be core to that orchestration and workflow capabilities, and that's really one of the things that Avaya believes in is bringing an open platform and this is going to give us the openness that allows third parties and our end customers to bring in AI capabilities to drive that routing or workflow decision making. You know there's a lot of data also that gets generated through AI, like I mentioned earlier, the reporting and all the capabilities we have. We think it's super important to kind of provide a single place where those customers can get access to that data. So again, a few of the highlights that we talked about again with Avaya.
Speaker 2:A lot of our customers really like the on-premise voice solutions that they've invested in. They spent years integrating that with third-party solutions, the routing decisions that they've made. They've really optimized those. But what they're really struggling with is how do I bring in the digital interactions, how do I have a single viewpoint of the customers and how do I leverage AI in those solutions? And this is really what our innovation, without disruption or the top strategy, is is allowing our customers to bring in through the cloud other capabilities and leverage that through a common orchestration framework. So what you'll see more is, as I mentioned about the unified customer journey, unified analytics those allow they can understand the history and you don't get that frustration. A great, highly scalable, ai-based routing engine that can leverage AI to route those agents and customers and matching those solutions. And then AI enabling those capabilities that you know allow us to drive, you know, self-service use cases or summarization.
Speaker 2:One of the other things that's really under valued in our industry these days is the quality voice interactions. We know a lot of agents are remote. In fact, I was at an incident with an agent myself where there was an agent remote and there was a crying baby in the background. One of the capabilities through our over-the-top solution is that we drive media to the cloud and by doing that we can allow our AI noise reduction to really make that audio experience really good. When you have a live human being or a live conversation, you want that audio experience to be as good as possible. That just doesn't help when you have a frustrating background noise or the person can't hear you. So there's a whole lot of capabilities we're offering from just that point of view, but really excited to bring in over-the-top innovations like AI enablement or bringing digital, and then the unifying of the data set through the unified customer journey and the analytics and reporting Great, thank you.
Speaker 1:Oh, fantastic, really exciting times ahead. And, giselle, you know talk about the ecosystem that Avaya has built and nurtured for so long. You had so many partners on stage with you, side by side. You know, maybe give us a highlight or an overview of the ecosystem as it stands today?
Speaker 3:Sure, Sure, but prior to that, I just want to highlight, or to add one preview I would say, to the great work that the product and engineering team has already brought in the workflow tool from our acquisition of Edify and integrated it under the AXP platform. So very rapid development in the roadmap there and more to come in our future updates. Now going back to your question, evan, on the ecosystem. So today's CX landscape is very diverse, right, and the customer experience touches so many themes and so many areas in the business that the reality is that there is no single vendor that covers the realm of the CX landscape, from customer engagement to the end of the journey, right. So the ecosystem and the open platform, specifically allowing ecosystem partners to integrate to it, is key. It's key to the success of the customers, it's key to driving outcome and value and to consolidating data in order to orchestrate the right experience and the right journey for the customers. This has been a cornerstone to Avaya for a while now, and we allow our customers to complement their portfolio with our ecosystem partners, either through native integration or app-in-app integration or an add-on to an existing investment that they do have with us.
Speaker 3:One clearly one the highlight announcement was our partnership with Zoom.
Speaker 3:That is more on the unified communication and collaboration suite, but it also continues and complements our innovation without disruption, message and drive and the choice of journey that we are giving our customers.
Speaker 3:So in the unified communication and collaboration suite our customers they do value the security, the stability of their prem telephony and communication platform. It has become more than just a telephony platform for them. It's integrated within their business application as well and disrupting. That means a lot for their business, but at the same time they have collaboration tools like Zoom. They've adopted collaboration tools like Zoom and they want to bring those two tools together to leverage one single desktop or one single user experience, while maintaining what they have and bringing collaboration capabilities within their ecosystem. We partnered with Zoom to really build an integrated native integration with our Aura platform to allow this choice to our customers. Another announcement in the same context was also expanding our partnership with RingCentral to bring in the same concept of integration between a leading collaboration vendor and our leading UC platform for PRAM solutions. In addition to that, clearly in the CX landscape, we continue to bring in and to collaborate with ecosystem partners and AI providers to bring in more use cases that complement our core Avaya experience platform.
Speaker 1:Fantastic Well, win-win for customers and partners. And, jay, I guess it's all about enhancing your offerings on both ends the partner end and the Avaya end, for customer value, customer benefit. But how do you see those partners contributing to you know your overall strategy?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we've seen talked to a lot of our customers is many of them are looking for the best of breed capability and things like workforce management. We partner with companies like Verint, which we're the leading solution set For AI. We've got a strong partnership with Google. We're bringing kind of the best capabilities to our solution set and we're really methodical about where we will partner. Again, our core belief is that Avaya needs to own the orchestration and providing a single insights on data and the reporting. But really we'll partner in all the other areas where we think our customers can get the most maximum value and they're always looking for the best solution that we have. We're dealing with the largest customers in the world and many of them are looking for that. Capabilities that really get that extra level of functionality or feature set that are the best in the industry.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can't beat that proposition. And I know, Jay, you follow key tech trends, as we all do. What do you think about this year? What are some of the key tech trends that will have the most impact on your customers and, of course, yourself?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know it's a great question and obviously you can't get away with it without asking. Talking about AI, you know, I think what we're seeing a few things. One is the acceleration of, you know, moving from reactive transactions to enabling autonomous journeys. But I think in the future, many of our customers are looking at how to be more proactive. They're having a more comprehensive view of all the touch points they have with their customers, with mobile app or desktop or browser or this contact center, and bringing in capabilities to unify that whole experience.
Speaker 2:I was fortunate enough to be with a whole set of CIOs leading CIOs in the industry a few weeks ago and they're looking at a Gen AI as an interesting area Also. The core thing I heard was many of the companies are looking at Gen AI for internal applications, whether it's improving efficiency for agents or just I mentioned reporting or other types of use cases. They're really still kind of waiting to monitor how Gen AI evolves and the ethical use of it when it comes to touching external customers, Really concerned about kind of bringing that technology there without having gone through a much more thorough kind of review of that capability. We ourselves have an AI enablement committee where we really methodically look at every solution that we're looking at and making sure it's doing the right thing, where it's ethical or it's responsible in terms of how it's interacting. So I generally see the move from just being reactive to be proactive, trying to look at Gen AI on how to use it. But you want to think I also see as Gen AI has become it's really democratized AI. It's becoming much easier to deploy AI solutions and many of our customers are using that to build their own AI solutions on top of our platforms which is kind of a little different than what I've seen top of our platforms, which is kind of a little different than what I've seen. Pretty much everybody I talk to engage has like an innovation team you know, working within their enterprise to look at how can they bring some of those capabilities because it is really easy to kind of deploy that, you know.
Speaker 2:The other thing I will mention that I heard a lot about is, and you know I think we've got a lull right now, but we've got to keep cognizant of cybersecurity and cyber threats. That's kind of emerging and you know there's some recent high profile attacks. Again, a lot of what I saw from the CIOs is making sure that we maintain that security posture and it's something we spend a lot of time with at Avaya to make sure our platforms are robust and, you know, can provide the best security for our customers. Finally, the one thing I'd say in the last probably year there's been a kind of a renewed kind of focus around kind of on-prem and hybrid deployment models, not being all in on public cloud. There's definitely some areas of risk or concern or cost issues again that customers are looking at. Wait, I've already spent a lot of money and invested in some of these tools. They've capitalized. Can I take advantage of them without having to do a whole soil switch when in many cases, some of those ROIs can be several years?
Speaker 2:So those are kind of some of the big trends that I've been seeing.
Speaker 1:Wow, that was quite a tour de force of what's next. And, Giselle, I mean, how should businesses prepare for these trends that Jay outlined to you know? Stay competitive, because their competition will be doing things as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's. I mean. Clearly, Jay covered the big topics that the industry is looking at and the reality is, whether you're looking at healthcare, education, banking, they're common denominators. But also one key point that the customers and the market is looking at are the human element, the employee experience. There is a real struggle in retaining and attracting talent within the workforce and this will always remain the key differentiator and in every company, the people that you have.
Speaker 3:Technology will always enable the people and with the focus on employee experience, there is certainly an eye on how can those companies in Gen AI to create summarization, to elevate the day-to-day repetitive tasks from the agent and to bring them to this zero-knowledge agent experience experience. But also with implementing those AI use cases to drive efficiency. There is a real stress and anxiety that this technology is creating to those employees because their job is changing. Because their job is changing, they have to answer to harder questions, to deal with more complex situations, to change with the changes that they have. So the change, fatigue and the anxiety is real for those employees. So we're also seeing an elevated importance to the employee and the agent well-being and the implementation of emotion AI to detect proactively, really recommend and drive tasks and workflows and orchestrate specific workloads based on the emotional state or the well-being of the employee. A lot of it's such a compelling and interesting topic that is developing more with the rise of AI and with the adoption of those technologies within the realm of large enterprises.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so well said. And, Jay, one of the big themes from Engage was, you know, ROI without disruption of existing systems and technologies. Not an easy task given the complexity there. How can Avaya help?
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, and you know we definitely have a lot of capabilities that we could show how to get progress and bring those solutions with the bearer that quickly I mean within several months. We can deploy some of these capabilities that can provide immediate ROI enhancements. You know, I think the world is going to change significantly in the next three to five years in terms of how AI evolves and brings capabilities to the CX experience, and I encourage customers to try to look at how can they start planting the seed, how can they start trialing that and proof of concepts that, again, we can help them deploy very quickly. They don't have to do a full rip and replace to get access to that. They can take the existing solutions and we can layer them those capabilities on and, as they learn how, what their future experience needs to be, they can start really defining the future customer experience platform that we hopefully would be a big part of our solution set that we can bring to bear.
Speaker 1:Fantastic and Giselle. When it comes to ROI, I mean a lot of questions about business outcomes and about taking careful looks at any investments these days.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:What do you think about that in terms of the metrics, the KPIs, the other items customers are really paying attention to and what are they telling you firsthand?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, the metrics and KPIs is another big topic, because the metrics and KPIs within the CX industry are changing and how to measure the satisfaction and loyalty of the customers is changing. So what we've done is we've simplified the approach to the CX platform in order to allow the customers to innovate without disruption, so to bring their solutions into siloed solution, into one platform, so they can start aggregating data and they can start getting a better view across the different touch points, whether independently of the deployment model and independently of the use case that they're building and driving. Adding new capabilities becomes an over-the-top approach, rather a completely separate system tool data measurement and this automatically helps them to be able to start measuring and maximizing their ROIs.
Speaker 1:Oh, really interesting. And I guess one last thought, jay. I mean my biggest takeaway from Engage was the nature of the open ecosystem that Avaya is nurturing. You know integrating with best of breed capabilities. You know orchestrating. You know multiple. You know multiple workflows and vendors, and it's a pretty big difference from the industry's approach over even five or so years ago. Is that an accurate takeaway?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, evan. Our belief is building an open platform. We deal with a lot of sophisticated customers who have the wherewithal to stitch some of these solutions together. Like I mentioned, many of them are bringing their own Gen, ei or AI capabilities to bear, and they want a platform they know that is going to be flexible, can partner, can integrate with other partners and really bring the overall capabilities we have. So we spend a lot of time on making sure our platform is open, but, you know, the ultimate thing, though, is we want to have a central place for all the data, though to be, and even that data platform will be open. So the point being is that, if they're using multiple solutions to stitch together an overall solution, the key thing is making sure all those customer touch points are stored in a single place that that customer can get access to, and they can do analysis of that at a later point. So that's the most important thing that we're providing a flexible, open platform, but a consolidated view of the data.
Speaker 1:And that leads into cloud. You know, big takeaway was hybrid cloud is and multi-cloud is the reality of today's large enterprise and that was reinforced by all the messaging. It sounds like you're open to all customer deployment models cloud in the public cloud, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, private cloud Is that accurate as well, jay?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. So we're spending quite a bit of time on our roadmap. Our long-term view is they have a single code base that can be deployed in any cloud environment, whether it's public cloud, like you said, on-premise, or in a private cloud model where Avaya is hosting it for those customers. Again, our customers have different preferences. Some of them want to kind of maintain their own private cloud and they really want to see a solution that's deployed on that. So we're spending a lot of time looking at a long-term platform vision where we consolidate all those solutions into a single code base that can be deployed in multiple different ways. You know, I think this is an interesting kind of technology discussion that we should have.
Speaker 2:You know, a few years ago it was kind of fashionable to take advantage of the native capabilities that public cloud vendors provided.
Speaker 2:But one of the problems you run into is your cost as a vendor become a little bit unconstrained.
Speaker 2:It's so easy to leverage some of those native public cloud uses capabilities that your platform kind of gets out of control and then you cannot create a flexible deployment model. And we're very cognizant of that and we're looking at that and leveraging public cloud where it does make sense, but building maybe some of the native capabilities ourselves, as opposed to getting tied to one public cloud vendor. That's again a change in kind of the overall platform ethos we have of how we define things. You know, we're much more efficient. We're trying to be much more cost-effective by doing some of the things ourselves. We certainly have enough scale, unlike some small startups that maybe want to leverage their taking advantage of those public cloud native capabilities. They have other areas that they want to invest in. We've sufficiently got enough of a customer base that we can really take advantage of using some of the capabilities ourselves, and it's a really important topic that I think we'll see a lot more discussion in the next few years.
Speaker 1:Well, there's so much more to discuss, but sadly I have to let you both go to your next meeting. But I'm excited personally for some rest and relaxation this summer, but it sounds like you're going to be busy all summer, gizelle. What are you looking forward to over the next couple of months? But you have a lot of work on your plate.
Speaker 3:Yeah Again. For me personally, the customer focus is key. So taking all what we've talked about and working with our customers to actually measure those ROIs and those outcomes and the value that the technology is bringing to them is what keeps me busy most of the time.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. And Jay, what about you? Are you going to manage to stay at home base a bit more this summer? Are you on a plane, like next Tuesday?
Speaker 2:I'm on a plane next week to Nashville, a week after that in India visiting our engineers, really looking forward to spending a lot of time with the engineering team there in India and looking at all the innovations and the great things that they're delivering. So no, unfortunately I'd be spending a lot of time out there, but really that's going to be. The focus is continuing to deliver on our roadmap commitments.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for the updates Really inspiring and insightful. Appreciate much for the updates, really inspiring and insightful. Appreciate your time and thanks everyone for watching. Reach out and follow and share some of the great work Abhay is doing here.
Speaker 3:Thanks guys, thanks for your time.
Speaker 1:Thanks for your participation here. Great Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks, bye-bye.
Speaker 3:See you, bye.