Contact Center

Businesses are built on the experiences they provide, and everyday millions of those experiences are created by Avaya. The company’s  open, innovative solutions enhance and simplify communications and collaboration  in the cloud, on-premise or a hybrid of both. Empowering its customers to grow in the Experience Economy, Avaya is committed to innovation, partnership, and a relentless focus on what’s next. It is the technology  partner that can be trusted to help clients deliver  exceptional Customer and Employee Experiences.

Driving Leadership to New Heights

Anthony Bartolo is Avaya’s Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer. He is responsible for driving Avaya’s leadership through its productsolutions and technology portfolio, which includes oversight of product development, product management, emerging technologies and corporate strategy across the company’s  Unified Communication and Contact Center portfolio. Anthonyhas over 30 years of functional and general management experience in transformational, high growth environments, ranging from startups to large-cap public companies.

Anthony returned to Avaya in November 2019 as an accomplished, proven communications industry and product leader with a career spanning nearly three decades. Previously, he served as Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer as well as interim CEO at Tata Communications Limited and in senior executive roles at Avaya and Nortel. Anthony was also named a "Power 100" individual in 2019, a global index of the most influential people in the industry, prior to joining Avaya. He is driving product leadership at Avaya, and relies on outcome focused, customer journey mapping. There is a lot of excitement about the work he is doing at Avaya, backed by its unique experience profile that includes carrier, mobility, and unified communications and contact center expertise.

Focussing on a Connected Customer Centric Strategy

Anthony believes that successful organizations understand the criticality of contact center innovation. They realize that the contact center is just one part of the end-to-end customer journey. They recognize the importance of multi-experience (customer relationships and user journeys based on effortless experiences designed across all modalities, versus channels and channel-focused products. Anthonyunderstands that it is not possible to have a connected customer experience without a connected employee experience. Therefore, Avaya works with organizations of all kinds to define the modern customer experience center, underpinned with exceptional employee collaboration and engagement solutions.

With one of the world’s largest install bases of contact center  solutions, offering private, public, and hybrid cloud, Avaya   continues to push the envelope. In September 2019, Avaya announced a series of enhancements for its  Contact Center portfolio, including Spaces for messaging between employees, managers, and customers. It also introduced a new scripting platform to help automate inbound and outbound call flows. Additionally, it also added a new dashboard engine that provides real-time understanding of customer journeys. In June 2020, Avaya announced a streamlining and simplification of the company’s cloud portfolio  under the Avaya OneCloud banner. Avaya OneCloud CCaaS will extend its global adoption in multiple cloud deployment models (public, private, and hybrid)in the coming months. 

Translating Disruptive Technologies to Integrate New Capabilities

The contact center is just one part of the end-to-end customer journey and user experience. It is no longer about how an employee handles a single customer inquiry within the contact center. It’s about how customers can move seamlessly throughout the entire  journey beyond the contact center, across all departments and lines of business using a broad range of touchpoints and interaction types. Because of this, there are many tools, capabilities and best practices used in the contact center that can (and should) be leveraged elsewhere in the customer journey. For example, conversational intelligence, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) solution that automatically transcribes voice interactions into actionable outcomes can be used  across sales, finance, among others to better understand the types of experiences customers are having throughout the entire journey.In April 2019, Avaya further extended its AI capabilities by deepening its collaborationwith Google in contact center AI. Avaya has two approaches to AI. It has its own R&D investments and organic development ongoing. Additionally, it works with technology partners, including Its A.I.Connect ecosystems of partners that enables customers to integrate new capabilities with leading vendors in the speech technology and AI-enabled customer engagement market. 

Breaking New Grounds to Shape the Future

Understanding how customer experience has evolved and how organizations are adapting, Anthony believes it is clear that the way the contact center operates and impacts the customer journey has dramatically changed. Avaya is breaking new ground, shaping the future of how communications and collaboration technology addresses both the future of work and the modern customer and employee experience center. The current macro environment has only accelerated what was a developing trend and the way  work is going to fundamentally change and move to a work from anywhere model. It will become the norm where work will become more distributed, and remote workforces must stay connected to ensurecustomer needs are met. 

Avaya is well positioned to lead. It has long been a leader in work from anywhereinnovation, including devices, video collaboration and the ability for contact center  staffto seamlessly work remotely as effectively as in the office. This has enabled its customers to secure the safety of their employees, quickly adopt new ways of doing business,like responding to  the recent pandemic, all while maintaining productivity and a superior customer experience. Avaya is well positioned to do it at scale and with the geographic reach unmatched in its industry.

Challenging the Redefinition of Future Work To Work From Anywhere

The company is enabling nothing short of the reimagining of the contact center,in which agents need to be able to handle  more complex questions, dynamic processes, and emotionally charged interactions that are coming their way. It can’t be denied that customers still prefer to call the contact center (research from Accenture shows that 58% more customers prefer to solve urgent or complex issues by calling for support rather than using other modes of interaction). Employees are becoming more strategic, long-term investments that provide higher value services compared to the contact center of old filled with college students and other short-term workers. AI and as a result the valuable insights that it unlocks across an organization can be delivered to an agent or customer when and where they need to create exceptional experiences.Employees have journeys and feelings that translate into the value delivered to the customer experience.

Perhaps most importantly, every employee across the organization is now an extension of the contact center, working together to enable an effortless and unified customer journey. It’s no longer about an employee sitting in a cubicle reading from a script. Organizations are delivering seamless multi-experienceengagement between employees, customers, and subject matter experts across the organization. The contact center of today represents the whole business as opposed to being a discrete function in the organization.

The employee experience powers the customer experience.

Some Avaya milestones include:

  • 86% of Fortune's Most Admired Companies in the World Rely on Avaya
  • Avaya powers 90% of the Fortune 100 and over half of the Fortune 500 companies
  • Avaya customers include leading global companies like American Express, Apple, Barclays, Bank of America, Comcast, Citigroup, CVS/Aetna, GE, General Motors, MetLife, UPS, and Walmart
  • Holds 100 Million UC lines and over 5 million contact center users
  • 19 of the world’s top 20 major banks rely on Avaya solutions
  • The top 10 insurance companies are Avaya customers
  • More than 4,800 educational institutions worldwide trust Avaya for their communications systems
  • Eight of the top 10 colleges in the U.S. rely on Avaya solutions
  • The Top 10 hotel groups worldwide are running Avaya solutions  
  • 80% of the world’s largest hotels and motels rely on Avaya
  • 8 of the world's 10 leading health services companies are Avaya customers
  • More than 5,800 healthcare institutions around the world rely on Avaya
  • 15 of the Top 20 World's Largest Airlines are running Avaya solutions
  • Avaya has more than 4,200 Channel partners globally

Recognition for Proven Excellence

Avaya has been recognized for delivering business excellence and some recent notable examples include:

  • Positioned by Aragon Research as Leader in Intelligent Contact Center Solutions for 2nd Consecutive Year– Citing Strength in Cloud, AI Delivering Exceptional Customer Experience
  • Acclaimed by Frost & Sullivan for Elevating Contact Center Workforce Engagement Management with its OneCloud™ Portfolio
  • Supports American Red Cross Disaster Recovery and Humanitarian Relief Capabilities with Cloud Communications and Mobile Solutions
  • Honored for Exceptional Innovation in Customer Experience Solutions, Empowering Contact Centers with Advanced AI and Natural Language Processing Capabilities
  • Recognized by IBM with Hybrid Cloud Excellence Award, for Communications and Collaboration solutions that Improve Customer Experience and Efficiency
  • Identified as a Leader for 3rd Consecutive Year in Aragon Research Globe™ for Unified Communications and collaboration based on its Innovative Cloud Offerings
  • Recognized by Leader in Conversational AI, Nuance Communications, for AI-powered solutions that enable customers and employees to work smarter