Avaya (News - Alert) has recently undertaken some internal adjustments in the way it does business, and those changes are now paying big dividends. One area that the company especially focused on is performance metrics, and the results have been rather profound.

We touched base with Mike Runda, president of Avaya Client Service, to hear what he had to say about the company and what it has accomplished recently:

TMC (News - Alert): What has Avaya been up to lately in the contact center arena?

Mike Runda: Maintaining Avaya’s leadership, as exemplified in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure, requires a constant and consistent commitment to innovation, vision and ability to execute.

Our focus is on helping businesses serve the needs of today’s consumer. These needs require a focus on tools that allow multichannel communications expanding beyond traditional channels to the latest mobile, social and Web tools customers desire to use, to communicate with businesses today. Analytics tools provide the wrapper to offer insights to customer behaviors and preferences across these channels.

In the last year, Avaya has introduced many new Contact Center applications such as Automated Chat and Speech Analytics to name a few. Avaya Automated Chat integrates with live chat support to deliver an intelligent response engine. Avaya Speech Analytics, which integrates the actual voice of the customer into performance management practices. We have even released a version of our Customer Experience Management solution, Avaya Customer Experience Virtualized Environment, that provides organizations with Avaya contact center applications, such as skills-based routing, multichannel interactions, reporting and self-service capabilities, optimized for VMware environments. ITNavigator, a recent acquisition, enables our Avaya Contact Center Control Manager and adds new solutions such as a cloud based social media gateway, unified reporting and management to our portfolio.

Avaya has spent the last year focusing on transforming the culture of customer service within the company in order to provide an even better customer experience. This was done by implementing new Avaya technology, improving processes and focusing on building the agents’ capabilities, skills and passion for the new support vision.

To increase Customer Satisfaction and the efficiency of resolving more than 600,000 support tickets issued each year, Avaya’s Client Services employees and Avaya Customer Experience solutions have been playing a critical role in transforming how customer service is delivered.   

The effort is paying huge dividends. Here are some key metric milestones in the last year:

• Customer satisfaction has increased 12.9 percent
• Net Promoter Score is up 38 percent
• Web utilization up 61 percent and Call volume down 39 percent
• Ticket Resolution time has improved 39 percent and Backlog is down 63 percent
• Employee engagement index score is up 12 percent

Avaya accomplished these performance leaps through revolutionary changes that brought together technology, people and processes in innovative ways.

TMC: Why should a potential client choose Avaya over a competitor?  What are some of your company’s attributes that set you apart?

MR: Avaya has maintained its competitive advantage by offering “best-of-breed applications for contact center environments with customer service requirements ranging from simple to complex.” That’s a direct quote from Gartner (News - Alert).

With our vast contact center portfolio and with firsthand experience in transforming our own customer service experience, we can help customers develop and maintain a competitive advantage through great customer service that evolves with customers’ needs. Our own evolution and large portfolio of applications for multichannel contact center, self-service, workforce management, and speech analytics serve as key differentiators.

TMC: Your recent whitepaper outlined some new initiatives you’ve undertaken. Can you summarize them for us?

MR: In the white paper, “How Avaya Transformed Our Customer Service,” we cover how we accomplished huge customer service and business performance leaps through revolutionary changes which bring together technology, people, and processes in innovative ways. The new paradigm has created a win-win solution for both happier employees who have their creativity stimulated and our customers who are seeing faster resolution and reduced backlogs. We have seen increased margins and customer satisfaction numbers.

From the beginning, we started with the underpinning goal of maximizing delivery of expertise based on the type of problem being encountered. We followed several key tenants to generate desired results, including:

• Employees will focus on solving the complex problems and the new problems of the day. Technology will be deployed to provide known results faster to the customers.
• Not every problem needs a live person to resolve it. 
• Context-based applications supported by processes and tools, such as Avaya Automated Chat (Ava the avatar) and Speech Analytics will drive efficiencies.
• New diagnostic technologies led to process improvements seen in dashboards.

Avaya has dramatically improved the time it takes to resolve customer issues, by taking full advantage of Avaya technology as part of a newly designed Avaya Support Website (ASW) that provides access to an unparalleled library of known solutions that are instantly published by Avaya engineers. The ASW’s multi-modal capabilities allow users to find information they are looking for in any way they want to communicate – via virtual agent, live agent and eventually video support. Avaya’s knowledge base contains a wealth of solutions, and we add more than 1,500 new articles monthly. When clients need help accomplishing a task, they can also tap into the large collection of Avaya how-to videos. The ASW Product Hub brings all relevant resources for an Avaya solution together in one location.

If Ava doesn’t find an existing answer within her knowledge base, she will bring a live customer service engineer into the conversation via Web Chat, Web Talk (voice over IP) or, in the near future, Web Video (Avaya One Touch Video). Clients do not have to repeat information to an agent; Ava saves a detailed history of the client’s issue and any attempted resolutions, giving Avaya technicians a head start in finding answers or creating a support request.

For complex issues, Avaya collaboration tools make it easy for agents to pull experts into a client conversation, instead of transferring clients between agents. Avaya agents leverage a host of Avaya-developed tools to accelerate remote troubleshooting. Those tools include the Avaya Diagnostic Server, which eliminates time-consuming investigation by monitoring Avaya systems and providing Avaya agents secure access to client systems.

Transforming customer service takes more than technology. Our innovative approaches to service processes and customer engagement have been a big part of our Customer Service results. The Avaya Emergency Recovery team is a high-touch team with the goal of having 85 percent of complete outages up and running in two hours or less. To accomplish this, Avaya now permits a client to immediately escalate a case to the ER team by selecting the “Total Service Outage” button on the ASW. 

Understanding our clients’ environments is an essential ingredient in providing an all-around excellent support experience. Though the use of “Capsule teams”, clients interact with the same group of engineers each time. Our “Adopt a Customer” program enables Avaya employees to gain a more in-depth understanding.

We believe every Avaya employee should be a client advocate, so Avaya measures the quality of every contact. Whenever a client interacts with a support agent, Avaya Speech Analytics will conduct real-time assessments so that Avaya can continuously identify opportunities for improvement in staff knowledge and professionalism.

TMC: What’s on the horizon for Avaya services?

MR: Avaya Services, with around the clock availability, has a relentless management program that is focused on driving high quality globally. Transforming customer service is part of an ongoing effort to redefine world-class service. Combined with our industry-leading Customer Experience Management solutions, Avaya’s support organization has achieved operational improvements that any contact center team would envy.

We are starting the rollout of Web Video to enhance the many communications options already available in the ASW environment. We are also planning to extend the full ASW experience to mobile platforms, which will give IT organizations more flexibility to accelerate issue resolution on the go. Last but not least we continue to invest in advanced diagnostic tool development as well as more automation to enhance the ease of leveraging Avaya’s services when renewing a contract, ordering parts, registering a product and initiating a new maintenance contract

As we continue to push the boundaries of leading edge Customer Service, our goal is to relentlessly drive for measurable improvements in customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and business metrics.