Avaya Reshapes Partner Landscape with New Cloud Products for a Hybrid World

From contact center apps to conversational AI software, Avaya and its channel partners are embracing cloud 3.0 with a series of new products that don’t disrupt a user’s existing systems. Rather, Avaya offers tools that are complementary for customers, the company said.

At the Avaya Customer Experience Center in New York City Thursday, executives showcased products and a vision for their company. In one demonstration, an Avaya representative called a doctor’s office complaining of a knee injury. Avaya’s conversational AI bot responded to the representative, showed empathy regarding her faux injury and was able to follow the conversation well enough to send a text message scheduling the representative for a doctor’s visit. It was like Alexa or Siri but a little more gifted. Using the bot also wasn’t dependent on downloading an app. Avaya’s conversational AI software also recognizes languages, eliminating the need for contact centers, for instance, to hire bilingual agents.

Avaya’s Karen Hardy

Karen Hardy is global VP of product management at Avaya.

“It’s been partly the pandemic that’s led us to a point where we’ve had a lot of remote workers who have needed the same tools as when they were in the office to when they’re remote,” Hardy said. “So, the technology road map has had to change. As Avaya looked at our road map, we had to look at what those employee and agent experiences needed to be, how immersive technology had to come into play.”

However, these products – many of which offer low code, no code solutions – show they are useful beyond a remote-office setting. They may have ubiquitous applications for a greater hybrid world. For example, when Avaya placed its virtual agent in the front of a chain of grocery stores, the chain reported a $3 million increase in productivity.

A New Era for Partners

Avaya’s Steve Forcum

“Partners can sell something that’s additive, not competitive,” said Steve Forcum, director and chief evangelist, marketing, at Avaya. “We’re empowering them to introduce technologies to customers that solve business problems. However, these solutions don’t carry with them the prerequisites of a platform change.”

Forcum added that from one sale, partners can keep adding new apps and services. A couple of years ago, Avaya introduced its subscription model. giving partners an opportunity to return to customers and have a different conversation. This enabled customers to experience a transformation to cloud and to Avaya’s OneCloud experience, the company said. These new cloud-based products and services on display build on that.

“Our customers [and] our partners love this approach because it is arming them with new tools and new services to introduce to customers instead of trying to … blindly call customers to find those opportunities, such as asking them if they are moving to the cloud,” Forcum said.