Very few providers can visualise an organisation’s systems throughout every level, whether they are internally focused or externally focused. Avaya’s communication solutions assist organisations within their own departments, but they also provide the customer contact solutions that directly enable customer interactions. This holistic portfolio gives Avaya a unique insight and understanding of how to provide the best customer service possible.
Other providers who specialise in a certain aspect of an organisation’s communication infrastructure cannot fully appreciate the different technological facets and how each will impact their ability to provide exceptional customer service. Avaya can examine all of these facets but also they have discovered how important the links, and communication pathways, between the different aspects are, and how they can affect CX provision.
UC Today spoke to Natalie Keightley, who is Solutions Marketing Director at Avaya, about how important an organisation’s internal collaboration is to their CX provision.
“As the customer journey has become so critical to organisations, enabling them to differentiate themselves, one of things that we have seen is not just the front-end services impacting CX but the internal collaboration and communication between departments.”
Many people might think that the main systems that affect CX provision are only the tools that directly manage and enable customer interaction, this is not the case with Avaya. Even with their innovative solutions in the customer contact space they want to assist their customers by ensuring they take a more comprehensive view of their communication and collaboration needs. This approach can dramatically impact how efficient customer service provision is within any organisation.
“Lots of organisations have initiated projects where they look at customer interactions and the customer facing functions in isolation from the back-office solutions. So you quite often see the processes being disjointed and the technology being different, which doesn’t enable users to provide the best end to end customer experience.”
The disjointed nature of an approach such as this can massively depreciate an organisation’s ability to provide exemplary customer service experiences.
“If you are really going to drive the CX end to end, across all the interactions consistently, at every stage throughout the customer journey what you really need to do is ensure you have the right team collaboration internally as well. Having the right collaboration and communication capabilities internally is critical to facilitating top quality customer interactions.”
Selecting the right tools and technology platforms is undoubtedly a challenging process for organisations, but it is one that Avaya, with their wealth of experience in communication and collaboration technology, are keen to assist customers with. Their huge global customer base, and knowledge within that, enables them to understand customer requirements across industry verticals and different markets.
Avaya have witnessed huge numbers of customer scenarios where they have been asked to help improve an organisation’s ability to provide and exemplary customer experience. Their approach does not begin and end with one of their industry leading customer contact platforms, like Oceana. Organisations are often surprised when Avaya ask them to consider the businesses entire provision of communication and collaboration solutions to ensure they can recommended the best approach to maximising their CX efficiency. Research driven reports from Avanade and Sitecore have shown that for every $1 spent on CX strategy, organisations are seeing a $3 return, and this is the sort of ROI Avaya are trying to help their customers realise. Examining the team collaboration tools used internally might not always be part of the consideration but that is something Avaya are hoping to change.
“Are you really enabling your teams to be as effective as possible and provide the best service as possible?”
“If it is difficult for people to communicate, or collaborate, with each other or to give visibility to what the expectation is from the customer’s perspective, how can you align the teams internally to be successful?”
When organisations look at improving their customer service and CX provision, internal team collaboration tools might not be on top of the list for consideration. Avaya’s holistic approach to technology implementations is designed to help their customers see the maximum benefits and considering all aspects, including collaboration is critical to that.
