Avaya will also offer the integrated Zoom Workplace solution, providing an enhanced collaboration experience to its core, which includes some of the largest business customers in the industry.

Add value to innovation without disruption

Avaya customers can get additional value from their existing investments in the Avaya Private Cloud and on-premises solutions, while leveraging Zoom’s user experience and interface to meet your collaboration needs.

«Today, companies are looking to benefit from the latest AI-driven innovations to help differentiate, accelerate and grow, while integrating new levels of performance with minimal disruption to existing core systems», said Alan Masarek, CEO of Avaya. “By partnering with Zoom we can deliver on the promise of ‘innovation without disruption’ to our customers, providing additional value to businesses through first-class collaborative experiences within the Avaya platform”.

“Zoom was created to offer a sophisticated and easy-to-use product, and as the platform has expanded to include hundreds of products and more features, as well as generative AI integrated throughout, Delivering an exceptional user experience remains central to who we are and something we continue to invest heavily in,” said Eric S. Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom. “Customers and partners like Avaya continue to turn to Zoom to meet their collaboration needs because of its speed of innovation and because it simply works. We are excited to offer that same experience to the thousands of Avaya customers who will benefit from a simple but powerful way to collaborate».

Enhanced collaboration with Zoom and Avaya

Current Avaya customers will retain their investments in Avaya solutions and devices while benefiting from Zoom’s AI-powered collaboration platform, Zoom Workplace.

Working together, Zoom and Avaya’s partnership is designed to deliver a joint solution that will provide an enhanced collaboration experience for Avaya customers, including:

• Interoperability across platforms and devices, allowing users to work in Zoom Workplace while leveraging their existing investments in Avaya’s Communication and Collaboration Suite, Avaya Aura and Avaya Enterprise Cloud solutions, without altering investments in existing customizations, workflows or infrastructure.
• Access to Zoom AI Companion, Zoom’s generative AI digital assistant.
• Collaboration solutions like Zoom Team Chat, Zoom Scheduler, Zoom Whiteboard, flexible spaces and more.

Avaya’s new integrated experience with Zoom Workplace and device interoperability will be available to Avaya customers worldwide in the coming months. More details on the joint solution will be shared later this spring.

This unique Avaya OneCloud Private offering targets the enterprise market in Mexico and can serve contact centers with needs greater than 400 seats and enterprises with more than 2,000 employees with digital workplace and collaboration needs.

Fernando Ruiz Galindo, Managing Director at Avaya Mexico, says: “Customization for our clients is vital. Each one of them is a different business with very high and specific interconnections and integrations, and with Avaya OneCloud Private we can provide them with what they need”. He adds, “I am sure that a private cloud as ours will change the game in the Cloud market and many customers who have not yet decided to migrate their on-premise platforms to the Cloud, will find in OneCloud Private the solution that is scalable, flexible and secure; plus all their data and information will continue to be stored within the country, to fully comply with the respective regulations”.

Benefits of Avaya OneCloud Private

• For those with on-premise solutions, maintenance and administration costs of local Data Centers are eliminated to move to a model as a service.
• Instead of making investments in infrastructure, the client will make service investments, which are also tax-deductible, giving them tax advantages. It is a shift in the financial structure, from being a customer that invests in CAPEX to a customer that decides not to be one that pays only for what it uses.
• If a customer already has a subscription contract with Avaya and decides to migrate to OneCloud Private there is no penalty for cancellation of the contract. If they have an on-premise solution and want to migrate to a OneCloud Private scheme, incentives and support and maintenance credits are generated.
• It contributes to dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of customers by eliminating their on-site Data Centers and generating virtualized environments.

These two Avaya Data Centers with large capacities are in addition to the two located in the United States (Texas and Ohio); in Germany, Singapore, Australia and the United Kingdom.

Total experience is about making connections, providing a perfect link between the customer, the employee, the user and the multiple experience. It also challenges organizations to think about the entire customer and employee experience. It requires building a strategy, having a technology capability and innovation frameworks embedded holistically, as the experience must be end-to-end. So rather than planning, implementing and measuring these different functions in silos, the total experience requires organizations to bring them all together.

Success Milestones

Total experience is a little phrase for a big idea. But how do you know if companies are on the cutting edge or lagging behind?

We’ve provided a way to measure the total experience through a comparative benchmarking study by IDG Communications. The main purpose of this study was to understand the role customer experience plays in the total experience. This helps companies to be truly customer-centric in an intentional way. The study explored these relationships through research with approximately 500 business organizations around the world.

The strategy and your customer

The only way to build a truly cohesive, valuable and forward-looking customer strategy is through the total experience. If you’re not thinking about how this affects end-users, then you don’t have a customer-first mindset. To provide customers with the best possible experience, all working parts must be happy, think about it: if employees aren’t happy, customers generally aren’t happy either. If suppliers don’t understand the service they provide due to miscommunication, customers won’t be happy when they have supply chain issues. All experiences must be combined in a coherent way for companies to function as a well-oiled machine.

For example, if a current user cannot easily interact with customer service without having a consistent experience across all of their devices, it will affect their overall experience. The interaction between the customer and the organization must be seamless, which is what the overall experience takes into account.

Cohesive Customer Interaction + Strategy

Only half of the companies surveyed in IDG’s study rated themselves as “good” at “cohesive interaction strategies.” What are the components that fall under this strategy? I’m glad you asked!

In our study, we had companies rank by the following: mobile devices, social listening, amplified service channels, real-time social media engagement and analytics. All of these influence not only a cohesive customer strategy, but also the overall business strategy and, you guessed it, the total customer experience journey.

At Avaya, sustainability is embedded in what we do. We are proud of our environmental stewardship and strive to reduce the environmental impact of our products, solutions, services and activities, as well as facilitate the return and end-of-life management of devices, batteries and packaging.

Responsible product design

In today’s experience economy, every experience matters. Similarly, when it comes to our environment, every decision matters. The consequences of climate change directly impact both our planet and our communities. By considering design and management throughout the life cycle of our products, our technology can play an important role in helping companies reduce their carbon footprint. It is our responsibility, both to our customers and to the environment, to design technologies that reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. This has enabled us to offer products that deliver energy efficiency, as well as economic and commercial benefits.

A great example of this is Avaya OneCloud. During the pandemic, Avaya OneCloud solutions proved to be more than efficient; they enabled a sudden shift to remote working and online learning. By enabling the interconnection of customers, employees, users and multi-experiences, they were able to create experiences to meet changing needs and bring organizations together in a secure, effective and efficient way.

Minimizing our environmental footprint

Beyond helping our customers reduce their carbon footprint, we also use our technologies to reduce our own footprint. We exceeded our CO2 emissions target and reduced our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 65% and Scope 3 emissions from business travel by 49% from 2014 levels. Building on our achievements, in March 2022, we committed to establish a near-term, company-wide emissions reduction target aligned to climate science with the Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTi). We will continue to identify opportunities to use energy more efficiently and, in the future, we plan to purchase renewable energy and work with our supply chain to reduce emissions.

We are also continually looking for additional ways to reduce our environmental footprint across our global operations. In 2020, we reduced water consumption by 6% and diverted 94 metric tons of e-waste from landfills, ensuring that it was recycled.

Helping out wherever we can

We face tremendous challenges in today’s world that require all of us to do our part. This year, for Earth Day, we launched an educational campaign designed to introduce Avaya employees to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a global plan to achieve a better, more sustainable future. By providing an overview of each of the SDGs and actions employees can take, we encourage action and support. This includes switching to more sustainable energy solutions, such as LED light bulbs, and choosing reusable products, such as water bottles and grocery bags. Even these small changes can turn into big results that have a significant, positive impact on our environment.

More to come

The Earth Day 2022 topic is “Investing in our planet.” As a company, this is our time to act boldly, innovate broadly and implement equitably. As a team, we are investing in our planet and our future by working together and supporting our customers as we respond to climate change. Together, we are driving positive change today and tomorrow, helping to make a difference in the world.

Frost & Sullivan cited Avaya’s strong overall performance for communications, collaboration, and customer experience (CX) solutions designed for the government vertical as factors in recognizing Avaya OneCloud. According to the report, Avaya stands out among technology solution providers with its extensive portfolio of cloud and premise-based solutions, communications endpoints, infrastructure, and professional and managed services capabilities designed to best serve their customers.

“Avaya’s vision for government and other public sector organizations is based on the acknowledgement of the rising importance of the experience economy and the aspiration to enable a total experience – personalized, full-featured and effortless,” said Elka Popova, Frost & Sullivan Vice President, Connected Work. She added, “Avaya OneCloud communications portfolio is comprised of Avaya OneCloud CCaaS, Avaya OneCloud UCaaS, and Avaya OneCloud CPaaS solutions enabling integrated and composable user and agent experiences”.

Avaya boasts one of the largest unified communications (UC) installed bases within the federal government and across the public sector market, assisting agencies in their migration to more flexible, scalable, reliable, and secure cloud solutions. The Avaya OneCloud experience platform includes CCaaS and UCaaS solutions built on Avaya OneCloud CPaaS, creating composable building blocks enabling organizations to extend it, build on it, and customize their applications. This flexible approach enables greater agility for public sector customers to migrate to the cloud, in particular, during unforeseen circumstances such as a pandemic or crisis situation.

According to Frost & Sullivan’s findings, cyber security ranks as the top technology investment priority this year for 50 percent of its respondents, including those in the government vertical. Security and reliability are also the top cloud provider selection criteria in its report, with 47 percent and 42 percent of government decision makers choosing these options.

“Unlike most providers, Avaya is able to satisfy stringent security, compliance, and integration requirements within the government vertical with private cloud deployments based on our established and vetted Avaya OneCloud platform,” said Jerry Dotson, Vice President, Avaya Government Solutions. “Our solutions satisfy the requirements for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA); Payment Card Industry (PCI); and we are FedRamp moderate-compliant certified, Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) certified, and offer Telecommunications Security Group (TSG)-certified handsets and Trade Agreements Act (TAA)-compliant software and hardware—which are uncommon capabilities among communications vendors”.

To become more adaptive and responsive, government institutions, such as Leon County, need flexible solutions that allow them to quickly deploy solutions that meet quick and changing circumstances. “Whatever the need, if our citizens are calling, we must be able to connect with them,” said Michelle Taylor, CIO at Leon County Government. “We required agility as different needs came up and Avaya OneCloud provided us with a flexible solution to address them.”

With a more open, collaborative, and secure communications environment across its various departments, the county has been able to centralize their communications across multiple departments for over 2,500 employees. Overall lessening the burden on IT and the ability to quickly adjust to keep pace with rapid changes and deliver experiences that matter – all while saving costs and improving productivity and responsiveness to Tallahassee’s approximately 275,000 citizens. Taylor added, “Frankly, we just wouldn’t be able to do it without Avaya.”

Frost & Sullivan’s Competitive Strategy Leadership Award recognizes the company with a stand-out approach to achieving top-line growth and a superior customer experience. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research in order to identify best practices.

According to the findings, most companies believe customer experience is an intrinsic part of their brand and it’s everyone’s responsibility to uphold within the organization. They also agree that a good customer experience includes empowered employees (Employee Experience) 82%; memorable, personalized interactions in moments that matter (Multiexperience) 83%; and the interaction of humans, data, and technology (User experience) 83%. Just over half (59%) of the respondents indicate they are performing adequately on each of these aspects of the Total Experience.

Unsurprisingly, customer-centricity correlates with good experience and communications strategies, yet only 60% say they have a cohesive customer interaction strategy. Most companies employ the standard customer support tools and platforms, such as email, phone, and social media. Those who scored higher in Total Experience empower employees with newer tools and platforms (messenger platforms, video chat, chatbots, and virtual assistants) that simplify support and transform customer experiences. They also utilize more complete analytic tools.

Seventy-one percent of businesses with good Total Experience scores and 74% with good interaction strategies are more likely to have the right customer insight technology. In fact, 97% of businesses say employees empowered with the right technology can transform customer experiences. The right communications and collaboration tools empower everyone. Offering customers and employees a broader communications solution allows everyone to communicate in a way that meets their needs.

Avaya OneCloud CCaaS makes it easy to connect everything—voice, video, chat, messaging, and more—to deliver effortless experiences for customers and employees at every touchpoint, enabling businesses to provide a Total Experience.

“A monolithic, one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t meet the wide range of needs businesses and their constituents have,” said Simon Harrison, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Avaya. “When companies intentionally combine customer, employee, user and multiexperience thinking, they elevate everything these approaches can achieve on their own – enabling them to deliver exactly what’s needed at every interaction. Avaya OneCloud is a Total Experience platform that lets you compose the experiences that each moment demands—for customers and employees alike.”

Some benefits of Avaya OneCloud CCaaS include:

• ​Smarter self-service: Deliver intelligent, conversational self-service—24/7—with options to connect with a live agent.
• Intelligent routing: Match customers with the best employees using business rules, internal and external context, and desired outcomes.
• Customer Journey Intelligence: Get ahead of every interaction by predicting needs and proactively engaging customers with customer journey intelligence.
• Completely connected employees: Enhance team collaboration with converged communications that dissolve front- and back-office silos.
• Simplify with a composable desktop: Put everything employees need in one place. Provide employees with a consolidated, simplified desktop view of everything they need across voice and digital channels. Connect your CRM application to get the best of both worlds.
• Deliver more with AI: Be ready for whatever customers might want next. Increase employee performance in real time by delivering prompts, initiating workflow actions, and enhancing compliance based on spoken words or phrases.
• Maximize performance: Create stronger teams. Improve interactions and identify skills gaps using quality management and advanced scoreboards to track, manage, and improve team performance, including gamification, coaching, and eLearning.

IDG Research is a full-service research company, providing a broad range of services to technology marketers to help inform marketing strategy and fuel content development. As a division of International Data Group (IDG), the world’s leading technology media, data, and marketing services company, IDG Research brings the resources and experience of a large, global company to its clients in the form of a small, customer-focused business.

The event was hosted online by Galib Karim, vice president of Avaya Latin America, who welcomed all attendees and special guests and presented the agenda of the conferences and LIVE panels to enjoy during the day.

At the opening conference of the event “Avaya Experience Builders, Reimagining the Experience Development Process”, Manuel Torres, Sales Engineering and Advanced Architecture Director for Avaya Caribbean and Latin America conveyed the message that we live in the experience economy and all those who are dedicated to customer service should provide excellent experiences, and those who do not differentiate themselves with it will end up competing on costs, which is not profitable. But, creating these experiences is not an easy task because it involves multiple work teams; also because what was valuable yesterday will not necessarily be valuable tomorrow, and because the customer evolves and changes constantly.

“Avaya develops technology that helps companies create these experiences in a simple way. We have been doing this for many years and we consolidate it in our Avaya Experience Builders strategy through which we facilitate the creation of experiences that matter to our customers, business partners and our own employees,” Torres concluded.

Juan Pablo Gómez, Corporate Consultant for Avaya Latin America, continued the talk by stating that Contact Centers must reinvent themselves through process automation to find the perfect balance between the use of technologies, the creation of tailored experiences for each of their customers and the definition of indicators for data-driven decision making.

“An important message we want to share with our customers across all industries is that with Avaya Experience Builders you don’t need to be a developer or programming expert to generate memorable experiences, but rather our solutions are what is known in the industry as Low-Code / No-Code tools where anyone involved can design and execute a strategy with simple, graphical processes,” concluded Gomez.

The event’s agenda went on with the participation of the first special guest, María Eugenia García Aguirre, General Director of the Mexican Teleservices Institute, who through her presentation “Latin America: Trends and Challenges of CX & Contact Centers”, explained that after overcoming a complicated 2020 and having achieved stability, the focus is now on the customer experience, but also on the employee’s experience. Regarding the Contact Center sector, she stated that as it is transversal, in all organizations it has increased its volume of operation, also boosted by the boom of e-commerce -because it is the one who provides support-, which has placed it in a position of greater relevance at a corporate level as a strategic area.

She also mentioned that, in Latin America, the sector has experienced a growth of 6 to 14 percent, not so much in installed capacity but in remote work, which has grown exponentially, and that today they are focused on talent professionalization, in addition to working more on achieving gender equity and diverse teams.

In terms of digital transformation, the Contact Center industry continues to work on channel integration and making omnichannel a reality, as well as migration to the Cloud where she emphasized that three out of four Contact Centers have migrated part of their operations to the Cloud and one out of four fully migrate to the Cloud.

As challenges, María Eugenia mentioned that Contact Centers seek to increase their participation in the face of increasing competition; automation, talent attraction and retention, compliance with regulations and legislation and telework management; cybersecurity, process optimization and AI technology integration, analytics and omni-channeling.

In his speech, Juan Pablo Tricarico, president of the Latin American Alliance of Organizations for Customer Interaction (ALOIC), shared the scenario of best practices in Contact Centers and Customer Experience in the Region with the important figure of 249 success stories winners of the Awards of the countries represented in the Alliance and the Latam Award granted by ALOIC; This demonstrates the quality and depth of the best practices represented in hundreds of millions of interactions per year, which make use of the excellent human talent component, the access to the necessary support technologies and the strategic leadership that is present in Latin America, both in national, multi-Latin and international companies; companies of all business verticals together with the prominence of Contact Centers and BPO’s of different origins and sizes, in addition to the growing commitment to honor and comply with the rules of compliance present in the Region.

Juan Manuel Gonzalez, Director of Digital Transformation at Frost & Sullivan, started his talk “CX in Latin America: What you must know to succeed in 2022” sharing the keys to the evolution of Customer Experience, such as: proactive, asynchronous and persistent customers; intuitive and easy-to-use self-service tools; technologies such as AI, analytics and the Cloud as the key to improve customer experience; the importance of the agent experience and their productivity; and the assertion that “digital is the new normal and customization the true differentiator”.

On the other hand, he shared the new thinking that will dominate the post-pandemic era focused on responding to short-term challenges; innovating business models considering the new consumer needs; placing the health of those involved first; and achieving greater agility and innovation in customer relations.

Juan Manuel concluded his speech by providing attendees with four winning recommendations for the era of the enhanced Customer Experience: the optimization of self-service; the empowerment of Contact Center agents; the digitization of CX by specialized providers; and, finally, a focus on customer and employee experience.

During the “Strategic Alliances Panel” integrated by Alejandro Crivelli, Sales Director at Verint Latin America; Martín Cabrera, Customer Engineering Leader at Google Cloud Chile, and Christian Moreno, Biometrics and Fraud Specialist for Latin America at Nuance Communications, Juan Pablo Stamati, Director of Alliances at Avaya Caribbean and Latin America, commented that “the management and continuous improvement of the customer experience is taking an increasingly relevant role in the evolution of the companies; it is a key piece of business to retain customers and make them happier. Within this scenario, Avaya’s alliances with leading companies in the market such as Verint, Nuance and Google are a fundamental piece that provides innovation and specialization in new areas of contact centers”.

Furthermore, during the talk they discussed success stories of joint work, such as the case with Verint of Atento Mexico, an example on how to manage the Contact Center operation efficiently, following the capacity to the demand, rescheduling shifts of agents in pandemic, working from home, through the use of the Workforce Management solution, e-learning and coaching, as well as the efficient management of the Virtual Office with the Desktop Analytics. “What is interesting is the continuous improvement in the pursuit of efficiency and, at the same time, improving the customer experience through the use of automatic Quality management solutions and Speech Analytics.”

Finally, there was discussion on what’s next in terms of innovation, such as voice and text analytics combined with surveys and behavior on websites to analyze customer satisfaction as a whole and predict future actions; as well as the use of biometrics through digital channels for customer authentication with minimal effort.

To continue with the day of the event, there was the “Panel: The Voice of the Customer” moderated by David Arconada, director of CX at BBVA and president of AMEC where they shared lessons learned, plans and changes that are here to stay in this post pandemic scenario. In this sense, Alba Duque, Self Service Manager at Claro Colombia, stated that teleworking is here to stay and there are technological capabilities to support it, such as Artificial Intelligence to achieve greater personalization with customers. Rubén Rivera, Commercial and Marketing Director at Atento Mexico, emphasized that it is necessary to be disruptive and continue innovating, because if we position ourselves as consumers we are always looking for someone to surprise us in the service we receive.

Along the same lines, Marcelo Caiafa, head of UC, Technology and Systems at Banco Galicia, shared that the need to equip the digital channel for self-management, the possibility of having that correlation of events along the customer journey to learn, improve and optimize processes and achieve operational efficiency is what we seek as a goal, in addition to excellence in customer service quality; And last but not least, Carlos Perez, Vice President of Operations at RCI, concluded that there is a great demand for flexibility from customers but that these customers are willing to pay for it. Another aspect that is here to stay is a good corporate communication strategy to be close to our associates or collaborators.

To conclude the event, Mario Cruz, leader of OneCloud Solutions in Avaya Latin America and the Caribbean, shared, through his conference “Avaya OneCloud: CX and The Cloud, a customized path” that companies in search of greater efficiency and business growth should focus on improving the Customer Experience, which requires adapting a Total Experience strategy that involves all employees within an organization. This customer-focused Total Experience must contemplate the evolution of “Composability” architectures and services offered in the Cloud. It should be noted that this Cloud alone is not the destination but the path and each company will have to determine, according to its business, a customized path that will allow it to establish that differentiator, create loyalty and capture new business.

“With Avaya OneCloud our customers can have a multi-cloud composite ecosystem supporting private, public and hybrid options, along with our technology allies such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and IBM, to drive intelligent automation to accelerate and reduce the cost of business workflows,” concluded Cruz.

This 2022 experts recognize the power of Avaya’s Contact Center and Customer Experience solutions, such as:

– Ventana Research Value Index for Agent Management – “Exemplary Vendor and Leader in the 2022 Agent Management Value Index.”

– 2022 The Cloud Awards – “Best use of Telephony / Unified Communications in Cloud Computing”.

– CX Innovation Awads – “Best Technology Partner of 2022: OneCloud Subscription Program”.

– Conarec Awards – “Relational Intelligence and Engagement Among Customer Care Market Players”.

1. Voice Biometrics

2. Automatic Call Distributor (ACD)

3. IP Telephony / VOIP Services

4. Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

Historically, the focus of customer service has been to increase efficiency by reducing the time customers must spend with a company. However, in today’s experience economy, companies that increase the attention and time they spend with their customers will be the most competitive. Doing this requires a purpose-built total experience platform and an ecosystem of experts for creating and staging experiences.

Time is a precious resource because once it is spent we cannot get it back. As one of my elementary school teachers often told me, “Wasted time is gone forever!” How we spend our time shapes our lives. Where and how time is spent can also make or break relationships.

An experience is something that happens within each of us. Each experience is shaped by experiences that have gone before and, therefore, are transmitted over time.

As we look back over our lives, it is often the exception to the expected that we remember. It is the extraordinary, the extra touch, that special something that happens “in the moment.” As Nathanial Hawthorn so eloquently puts it, it is the “shadows left by time” that inform where we will devote our attention, time and money.

Time defined by customer service

“Time is not the main thing – it’s the only thing! ” – Miles Davis

One of the keynote presenters at Avaya Engage this year was Joseph (Joe) Pine II, co-author of the groundbreaking book “The Experience Economy” released 23 years ago; a work so prolific that it was re-released this year with additional content. Joe has devised a kind of “time continuum”, mapping it on a spectrum consisting of time lost, time saved, time well spent and time well invested.

This time model works very well to describe a wide range of experiences. For example, most of us now understand that getting in a car and driving an hour to work can be a “waste of time.” The “time-saving” alternative is to connect virtually. And the most progressive companies are providing their employees with tools (time well spent) like Avaya Spaces, which goes well beyond video conferencing to reinvent the overall workflow collaboration experience.

In the customer service industry, the focus has been primarily on “saving time.” This concept has always been part of the employee and customer communication experience, fostering advances ranging from abbreviated and automated dialing to high-speed ethernet connectivity (versus low-speed dial-up modems), text messaging and today’s intelligent assistants. For customer service centers, the most commonly used measures, such as call times, are intended to drive greater efficiency and reduce the amount of time our customers must spend with us to resolve their issues.

But when we stop to think about this, does it make sense for customers to spend less time as a key business objective?

Customer experience behind the wheel.

“Do what you do so well that they’ll want to come back and see it again and bring their friends.” – Walt Disney

It has been said that the easiest way to turn a customer interaction into a bad experience is to provide a bad interaction. Recent research from Avaya indicates that two out of 10 customers walk away after a single bad experience and six out of 10 will walk away after multiple bad experiences. To make matters worse, they are likely to report bad experiences to friends and family when using social media.

Joe has also discussed a “flywheel” model for employee-customer interaction that I believe works much better for today’s experience economy. In this model, the employee or company personalizes the interaction with the customer, which generates more benefits for that customer and makes them want to spend more time with the company. Since every interaction with a customer is an opportunity for the company to learn more about the customer, the company can personalize even more, generate more benefits and make them spend more time. It’s an upward spiral that benefits both the company and the customer.

A total experience approach means making customers want to spend MORE time with your company and it also means more engaged employees.

You need a time machine

“There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of space, and a fourth, time …” – H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

Gartner cites total experience and composable applications as strategic trends for 2022 and beyond. Orchestration of the total experience for today’s empowered employees and customers requires an experience platform. Avaya OneCloud is an award-winning experience platform that provides the necessary experience compilation capability and unique tools and capabilities to drive speed to value for experience delivery.

It’s like a time machine, allowing you to manipulate the time your employees and customers should spend, and organize experiences that will make them want to spend more time with your business.

It enables something called Combinatorial Innovation. This is an industry term that refers to combining existing components to make something new. Avaya OneCloud’s ability to combine the existing with the new accelerates the speed to value for its users. This is because the speed to value is determined by two main factors: speed and the effort required.

Because Avaya OneCloud is specifically designed for composability, it provides greater speed of innovation than monolithic platform designs. In addition, the fact that the experience design builds on existing and proven unified communications and contact center technology, and starts very high up in the application stack, means that much less effort is required than with alternatives that require starting with a blank sheet of paper.

You also need time travel companions

“None of us is as smart as ALL of us!” – Ken Blanchard

But having a platform is not enough, you need people who can use it to create the experiences. Avaya Experience Builders is a massive ecosystem that gives all Avaya customers access to the resources needed to create this experience. It includes Avaya’s broad global customer base, technology partners, channel partners and agents, and Avaya’s unique expertise and tools. These time-traveling partners will help you transform your business into a Total Experience-centric model.

Experiences that matter

Avaya’s motto is Experiences that Matter – that’s because we help our customers do important things, like process financial transactions and save lives. The top 10 airlines in the world; the top 10 medical facilities in the United States; seven of the top 10 healthcare companies in the world; the top 10 commercial banks in the United States; the top 10 automakers in the world; and more than 100,000 customers in more than 190 countries, including 90 percent of the Fortune 100 companies headquartered in the United States, all rely on Avaya for the experiences they deliver to their employees and customers.

The ability of Avaya experts, our partners and our customers to rapidly design and deliver mission-critical experiences was very evident during the pandemic. This Avaya Experience Builder ecosystem delivered overnight experiences to citizens in government, healthcare patients and across other industry verticals.

After researching the various perspectives in time to create this publication, and also considering the experiences that really matter, comes a very important observation: we should all spend more time with the people we love.

Avaya Experience Builders makes it easier for businesses to build and deliver customized experiences by providing co-development support, including existing or completely tailored experiences, or technology to compose their own. Experience Builders span a wide range of markets and use cases, including:

• Quantiphi is an Experience Builder specializing in Google Cloud Contact Center AI (CCAI) services for transforming the experiences of customers and staff across a number of verticals including healthcare, financial services, retail and more. “The innovation we develop in AI and machine learning technologies brings ease of integration with the Avaya OneCloud portfolio, helping organizations reduce costs and improve the customer journey across channels. Avaya customers continue to see positive results and I am excited about the tremendous opportunity we have in front of us,” said Gaurav Johar, Practice Leader for Conversational AI, Quantiphi. “As our ecosystem of fellow developers and innovators expands, we are able to serve new customers with unique solutions designed to meet the specific needs of the many markets we serve, including healthcare, autonomous vehicles, banking, retail, telecom, media and entertainment, and government.”
• ConvergeOne is a proven, services-led cloud solution provider that utilizes its intellectual property and unique methodologies to create value for customers and develop progressive solutions that connect people with purpose. The company has spent decades building upon its customer offerings which span the core technology markets including cloud, customer experience, cybersecurity, data center, enterprise networking, and the modern workplace. ConvergeOne is an Experience Builder leveraging Avaya OneCloud CPaaS as seamless and flexible architecture for its C1 Conversations solution. “With C1 Conversations, customers have a platform to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives without fear of further fragmenting their service with point solutions,” said Jeff Bloom, Senior Director of Business Development, ConvergeOne. “C1 Conversations is easy to adopt, meeting customers where they are, requiring no rip and replace of existing communications solutions.”

• Clemson University is one of the leading public research institutions in the U.S. and an Experience Builder leveraging Avaya OneCloud collaboration capabilities to create an exceptional digital learning experience for students and faculty. Developed pre-pandemic but accelerated due to the need for remote learning, the platform has been embraced by students and is being expanded for modern computational biology training activities. “This cloud-based platform has made me a better teacher, and I will never go back to in-class only learning,” said Clemson Professor Frank Alex Feltus. “Currently comprised of interactive learning resources, experiential labs, virtual collaboration and online classrooms, AI-powered curation and more, we have a virtual, centralized learning experience that can grow with us, tailored to our needs.”
• SpinSci is an established market innovator focused on digital healthcare solutions through a comprehensive set of patient access workflows. The company serves over 100 Fortune 500 companies and over 50,000 clinical and non-clinical agents. SpinSci’s cloud-based Electronic Health Record (EHR) integration drives context-based care management to health systems by leveraging Avaya OneCloud CPaaS and CCaaS. “Providing optimal patient engagement and real-time data driven care management today can’t be based on a monolithic solution, but requires intuitive multi-experience capabilities that orchestrates across disparate systems,” said Rajit Kumar, CEO, SpinSci Technologies. “Avaya is a leader in contact center solutions with an extensive ecosystem of developers and partners, and a natural fit for us to collaborate with.”
• Journey is the developer of a patented, trusted identity platform and network enabling highly secure, privacy-preserving customer experiences in establishing identity in the contact center. The Journey digital trusted identity platform, integrated with Avaya OneCloud CCaaS offerings, enables enterprises to onboard, authenticate, interact and transact with customers in a secure and simple manner leveraging sensors and tools in smartphones or laptops. With its use of facial, voice and device biometric technologies and more, Journey can authenticate users with 99.9999% accuracy in less than two seconds. “Journey’s solutions provide Avaya contact centers with unique security, privacy, payment, and regulatory compliance capabilities that significantly enhance the experiences they are able to provide to their own customers,” said Brett Shockley, CEO and co-founder, Journey. “We are excited to be showing our solutions at Avaya ENGAGE 2021, and connecting with the growing innovation network that is represented here.”

“We have tens of thousands of partners, over 150,000 developers, plus more than 100,000 customers worldwide, and the ambition to ensure every citizen developer can build experiences with the Avaya OneCloud platform. Avaya OneCloud and the innovation Experience Builders are delivering every day are creating stronger brands, changing entire industries, and in many cases improving lives,” said Simon Harrison, Senior Vice President and CMO, Avaya. “Experience as a Service is what we can provide enabling Experience Builders around the world to compose and wrap solutions around their own customers, tailored to every use case and every user. Avaya ENGAGE 2021 is the showcase for these innovators to tell their stories, and we embrace these partners who are changing the game.”

Avaya is providing demos of Avaya Experience Builders innovation at the annual Avaya ENGAGE user conference in Orlando, FL this week. For more information, go to Avaya ENGAGE 2021 at: https://avaya-engage.avaya.com/avaya-engage-2021

The vast majority of respondents in Latin America believe they would be happier with a hybrid model, working part of the time at home and the other part at the office. In fact, Colombia (90%), Chile (83%), Mexico (81%), Argentina (79%) and Brazil (78%) are among the countries in the world where most people think a hybrid work model would be best for their happiness.

The following questions sought to delve deeper into the reasons behind respondents’ happiness and unhappiness. Many of the concerns behind the pandemic have to do with work. The main challenge is to achieve a balance between family life and work, a response led by China with 72% of respondents, followed by Brazil with 67%. In Latin America, Brazil is followed by Chile (52%), Argentina (47%), Mexico (41%) and Colombia with 36%.

The study reveals a connection between happiness and productivity. Colombia, with 74% of affirmative answers, is the first country in the world where respondents say their productivity improves when they are happy at work, followed by Brazil (70%), Mexico (69%) and Argentina (65%) in Latin America, a region that occupies four of the top five positions in this question.

The study also showed the great increase in popularity of teleworking in Latin America in the last year. The vast majority of respondents in Latin America felt that they would be happier with a hybrid model, working part of the time at home and the other part in the office. In fact, Colombia (90%), Chile (83%), Mexico (81%), Argentina (79%) and Brazil (78%), are among the countries in the world where more people think that a hybrid work model would be better for their happiness.

Gaston Tanoira, Technology Leader, Avaya Latin America says: “Instead of “back” to work, employees will go “forward” to work with a new core of work, using Cloud-based productivity applications as part of a digital workplace and Avaya OneCloud solutions maximize this new way of working”.

In summary, these are the key findings of the global study:

• Our family and work life has changed, because events have changed us all.
• Our values have changed: honesty, respect and optimism are more important than before. We want organizations to reflect our values.
• We embrace the opportunity of hybrid work, but we are concerned about the potential impact of automation and artificial intelligence (AI).
• Our digital shopping lives have accelerated, but we still want physical experiences when we shop, travel and have interactions with other people. We want organizations to be digital and human at the same time.
• Beyond 2020, the change-makers leading this shift in our lives and work are families with children at home; they have the most to gain from new ways of living and working.

Avaya commissioned the study from Davies Hickman Partners, an independent research and analysis company with global operations. The survey was completed in June 2021 in accordance with UK market research guidelines.