Avaya ENGAGE was an opportunity for celebration, reflection and anticipation.
Avaya could celebrate and reflect upon the impressive progress made under CEO Alan Masarek since his appointment almost a year earlier — not only in exiting Chapter 11 bankruptcy but refining its business strategy, reasserting confidence in customers and shareholders, and outlining a coherent and compelling vision for its future.
“The big theme I asked everyone to come away with, or my hope the takeaway was — undeniably, unquestionably, Avaya is back,” Masarek told UC Today in an exclusive interview. “I think that came through in just complete clarity.”
“It’s been a great journey,” Masarek continued. “It’s been super busy. I started on August 1, and since that point, we’ve gone through massive financial restructuring, which has been super successful, a cost right-sizing.”
“But all that work we’ve done on the core business is about resetting product and go-to-market strategies. Resetting things thematically is what we referred to as ‘Innovation without disruption.’ Organising the company in support of those strategies and then revitalising the culture has really happened. Along the way, our customers and partners have been unbelievably supportive.”
Avaya could also take time to feel excited in anticipating what comes next, namely the fulfilment of that vision, which Masarek previously summarised as pursuing the “North Star of CX”.
Avaya still has significant UC elements to its business, however. What place does UC have within this star-chasing ambition?
Masarek intriguingly argued that Avaya’s UC portfolio is intrinsically linked to its CX-focused strategy — that UC and CX are converging.
“UC is super important, but I think about CX being where the market is going,” Masarek said. “Communication companies in the past used to think of themselves in siloes, as in ‘I do UC for the knowledge worker’ or ‘I do contact centre for the agent’. The reason it’s converging is that the brands have to differentiate based on customer experience. What drives your ability to deliver a positive customer experience is you have to have that full lifecycle of your customer.”
“Think about what every business does,” Masarek added. “They go outbound to prospects; the BDRs do that. The salespeople turn some of those into customers. The customers come inbound to the agents, and then the account management or success organisation goes outbound for upsell, renewal, engagement, and those things like that. Those interactions, which are the core of the customer experience, are crossing the front-of-house agent and the back-of-house knowledge worker.”
In other words, it has to be a converged solution on one system. Masarek also highlighted that the contact centre is, essentially, routing technology.
“What I just described in that flow is going outbound and then turning customers who come inbound to go outbound again,” he said. “That’s routing. So what’s happening is that the whole interaction with customers, from prospect to the whole lifecycle of the customer, is now happening omnichannel. Not just voice, not just digital, but across all channels. It’s a crossing between the agent and the back-office knowledge worker.
“So, CX or contact centre is so pivotal to that. I like to call it the heart, lung and liver of that. But UC is a component of it. That’s exactly the way we’re designing our solutions.”
As Masarek affirmed, ENGAGE was quite rightly a celebration of the significant steps towards recovery, an assertion that Avaya was, indeed, back. Now having got most of its ducks in a row after such a busy but remarkable first year for Masarek, with a new Avaya C-suite and rejuvenated business plan featuring partnership and platform growth, the imminent future is where Avaya will look to execute on all the vision and promise it has outlined.
Asked what the next 12 months will hold for Masarek and Avaya — in year two of his stewardship — the CEO cut that timeline almost in half.
“I’ll shorten it to only six-and-a-half months from now,” Masarek said.
“I’ve been thinking a great deal about this. When we’re clinking champagne glasses at the end of this year, I’m absolutely convinced you’re going to look backwards and say, ‘Avaya is a completely different company’ — meaning it has a completely revitalised culture, it is back in every meaningful way, and the products are coming out exactly the way we articulated them to the customers. The customers now are driving growth with and for us, partners the same.”
“I think it’s going to feel very, very different. We’ve had to do a lot of foundational building, going back to last August. A whole financial restructuring, a cost right-sizing, a resetting of strategy. But my sense is that that flywheel, which we’ve gotten to start turning, is going to flip over in a very positive way in just six months.”
“So when we clink those champagne glasses (at New Year’s), I think we’re going to be looking back and feeling pretty good about where we are.
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