One of the major buzzwords you may have heard hovering around the UC Industry at the moment is DX, or Digital Transformation, which is a term typically used to describe the path a business takes as it begins its journey into the cloud.
In a recent interview with Neil Whitelock, Director of Cloud and SI Alliances for EU North East at Avaya, UC Today set out a series of engaging questions to help our readers gain a better insight into what this term means and how Contact Centre and UC industry giant, Avaya, have used it to help their customers get the most from their cloud solutions.
What is Digital Transformation?
The question is so broad that if you asked two people, you’d get two vastly different answers. Ultimately for us to deliver to customers’ expectations, Digital Transformation is around how they work with their customers, how they provide customer engagement through multiple channels, and how they optimise their business.
How does DX fit into Avaya’s business strategy?
There are currently two big drivers for businesses: their journey into the cloud, and their journey towards digital transformation. Typically, most customers will be on one or the other, but they are both interconnected and interdependent. One could argue that the journey to the cloud is one of the enablers for digital transformation. As we launch market-leading solutions including Avaya Breeze™ and Oceana™, these are helping our customers to work and deliver omni-channel experiences like SMS, Web Chat, Video Chat, AI-driven automated interaction and Social Media. The challenge for us is to make sure our customers can deliver effective communications to their customers across those multiple channels.
With Avaya Breeze™, which is embedding communications within operational workflows and vice versa, customers end up with a more attribute-based environment – their workflows are routing calls to people who have the time, skills or capacity to handle them.
And then we have collaboration. Email can often be a burden and not a benefit, and I believe there are many people who feel the same. Collaboration sites are great for employees to get off email and work together to see an outcome in real-time, rather than having to read email after email from the last few days. Avaya Equinox™ enables this by creating a seamless engagement experience for employees, regardless of their locations and devices.
For Avaya that’s where we see areas of focus that can help challenge the customer but also take them on a journey that delivers a hugely beneficial outcome.
How does DX benefit businesses?
End users need clarity in this complex and competitive world. And that requires the efficient management of information. We’ve all got smartphones with multiple notifications – it all becomes difficult to know what is valuable and what is white noise. We’ve got an opportunity and responsibility here with our customers to help them understand what is good data that they can reference and use to their benefit and what is less relevant – Avaya Oceana™ and Oceanalytics provides our business customers with data analytics that enable them to optimise the time spent with their customers.
How are Avaya helping their partners help their customers?
We are helping partners help their customers optimise their own contact centre by providing a full portfolio of cloud platforms from SME through to enterprise. With this portfolio we can help ourselves and our channel respond to the increasing market demand for cloud based computing. This is all underpinned with a robust and efficient service platform.
Avaya has made the full transition to software and services. The work we have done to transform into a contact centre, cloud and services-focused organisation has put us at the head of the market. We understand customer pain points because we’ve been through that material transformation ourselves! Because we understand how customers are having to adapt, we provide our partners with a huge amount of confidence in our solutions. The underlying technology is fantastic; Breeze™ and Oceana™ are leading the evolution in how businesses can leverage their platforms to optimise customers’ experiences.
Is DX technology, culture or both?
It’s a mixture of both. One could argue that the journey to the cloud is one of the enablers for digital transformation and enabling an omni-channel experience is a critical step in the evolution of customer engagement .
From a cultural perspective, the challenge we all face is the decreasing patience levels of consumers which is driven by the increased adoption of new technologies especially by Millennials and Generation X. The amount of shopping baskets left half full as customers get frustrated increases by the quarter, and that ‘attention-holding’ aspect is clearly where online businesses face a great challenge.
