In this industry, many businesses are built on the experiences they provide their customers with and Avaya has been a key player when it comes to enabling this. Avaya has created customer-based intelligent communications experiences for both customers and employees alike for nearly two decades.
The company now provides innovative solutions to enhance communications through the cloud, on premise or hybrid cloud.
At GITEX, Telecom Review secured an interview with President of Avaya International, Nidal Abou-Ltaif, to discuss the vendor’s presence at GITEX and the region in general.
What is Avaya’s strategy for the region?
All along, our strategy has been to provide solutions to our customers. We adapt and modify our strategy based on new trends that emerge in customer demands because what we provide is not pure technology, what we provide is technology and a set of services that deliver an outcome for the customer based on their wants and needs.
Our strategy has always been customer-led seeing what is demanded and also mixing it up with the latest technology and trends in the market.
Ensuring customer loyalty in such a hyper-competitive business environment can be done through high quality offerings. In the same way, employees require powerful tools to enable them to be more productive in the workplace.
I feel that over the years, our contact center and unified communications solutions have enabled us to understand the needs of both employees and customers which has enabled us to develop our next-generation communications platforms.
What are some of the big innovations that you have launched at GITEX this year and how do they play into the company’s strategy?
Our core business is based on contact centers and unified communications for the ultimate customer experience, starting from the employee and going all the way to serving customers; we innovate around this. Through our customer experience centers, we create personalized, hands-on solution demos for businesses which effectively shed some light on the possibilities of digital transformation for that respective business.
At GITEX this year we launched and announced a wide range of solutions, products and partnerships.
We launched our CCaaS which stands for ‘Contact Center as a Service’ which enables customers to enjoy a cloud-based customer experience software. . This CCaaS model allows them to essentially only purchase the technologies that they really need which as a result, reduces the need for internal support from the respective business’s IT department.
Our CCaaS platform is now available on Microsoft Azure which is hosted by Microsoft’s cloud data centers in the cities of Abu Dhabi and Dubai. For the initial phase, this will be launched in the GCC region but we hope to expand the offer to other regions in the future.
We also launched some of our AI-enhanced technologies such as biometrics and real-time sentiment analysis to our communication platforms which enables organizations to utilize voice as a key user interface to ensure a better, more seamless customer and employee experience.
In my opinion, voice is a vital part of the customer service procedure and there seems to be a key opportunity for it to be utilized better to ensure greater customer experiences. Since Avaya is a leader in the enterprise communications solutions market, we have decided to harness the advantages of emerging technologies and apply them to our products and services.
We also launched the next-generation version of our video conferencing technology and telephone sets.
What is Avaya doing in the field of emerging technologies?
This year at GITEX we were showcasing some industry firsts along with our several technology alliance partners as well as over 15 customers from all over the world. These organizations have helped us develop use cases for emerging technologies.
Everything we do is based on emerging technologies. We were early adopters but we approached it from a customer-centric angle.
What are some of the region-specific challenges Avaya has faced/has been facing? And how are you tackling these issues?
Our challenge is no different than other technology companies or solution providers in the market. It changes from one market to another.
Sometimes the telecom regulations that are imposed on us affect our business especially when it comes to aspects of our services like video, open platform and social media integration to contact center or to customer experience. I think we aren’t the only ones dealing with the challenges that come with these regulations.
We acknowledge the importance of security however, some of the regulations are too stringent and as a result, we have to do a lot of extra work that could perhaps be avoided.
Another challenge that comes from working in this region is that there are conflicts in certain areas where greater safety measures need to be taken.
Could you comment on Avaya’s success in the region this year?
We are experiencing continued success, not just in the MEA region, but other regions as well.
If we look at the Middle East and Africa specifically, we have had some great success this year namely in Saudi, Egypt, Kuwait and the UAE. We signed a lot of deals which were either done before GITEX or concluded and announced at GITEX. A lot of our collaborations and announcements have been based around modernizing the customer experience by bringing it into the new digital world.
In fact, no other technology provider offers all the applications you need to accelerate your business. Throughout the years, Avaya has built strategic partnerships with some of the most esteemed technology brands and through our R&D engagement, strong customer service, innovative solutions and our ability to deliver seamless capabilities through them has led to our success.