1. What will be Avaya’s major areas of focus over the next twelve months? 

We will have a relentless focus on the business user. We’re going to deliver business value to our customers by focusing on the way our products are used by the business end user -- whether it’s the business owner, department manager, knowledge worker, etc.

First we will focus on  interaction solutions (Interaction Center, Contact Center, Voice Portal, Proactive Contact) expanding and extending the capabilities of existing applications with a strong focus on high-scale and application flexibility.

Second Performance Solutions - contact center performance management (CCPM) and analytics, both of which offer significant benefits to call centers, their management and staff, and their clients.

The third component is extending our capabilities into the enterprise. This is where our interaction and performance capabilities get extended into enterprise capabilities. There are tremendous opportunities to create business value by leveraging the enterprise into the contact center, and the contact center into the enterprise.

We will also deliver a solution for the mid-market this year.  

2. Avaya is a major player in the Unified Communications arena.   What applications have been most frequently adopted?  What “buy-in” obstacles have you encountered? 

We are seeing mobility and conferencing as the most adopted applications due to the cost savings they can bring to a business.  We are also seeing video and general tele-working increase in adoption due to economy drivers and real estate prices.

The major obstacle is adoption of the end user into the everyday process to recognize gains and ROI projected.  It is critical to measure this ROI to prove gains to a customer and ensure they continue to recognize these through further adoption.  For example, as we begin to see UC and CC merge, and enhance customer communications as a result that ROI will prove even easier to measure based on our contact center analytics solutions.

3. There has been much discussion on the economic downturn’s effect on business conditions.   Has Avaya felt the impact of the current economic climate?  If so, how is Avaya reacting to it?  

The economic downturn has touched everyone globally.  Though we cannot say we are 100% recession proof, we are able to help our customers sustain and thrive during these tough economic times by creating efficiencies in both their customer service and enterprise communication solutions.  For example, automation is top of mind within the contact center market … we have a proven, market leading, solution that enables automation of any contact, inbound or outbound, over any channel.  By implementing such capabilities, which can recognize an ROI in even just a few months, businesses are able to see valuable long term gains, and sustain and thrive in today’s economic climate.

4. Avaya has put a lot of emphasis on speech self-service applications.  How does Avaya differentiate their offerings from some of their competitors, i.e, Aspect Software, Cisco, Voxify?  

It’s more than just a self service speech applications,  it’s a customer service strategy.   Using self service applications not only for traditional inbound handling and routing of calls at the edge, but also using self service to proactively reach out to customers with alerts and notifications of value added information creating a high touch, high value end to end customer experience.   What differentiates Avaya from the rest is our professional services organization.   

Another differentiator is the Avaya professional services organization.  This team has over twenty years industry experience in Self Service solution design, Voice User Interface Design and implementation.   They are certified VoiceXML designers and development engineer, certified customer behavior intelligence/human factor engineers who can objectively analyze and present customers’ step-by-step behavior user interaction across the enterprise.

5. There have been some recent indications that the perceived value of the contact center within the enterprise has risen.   Have you found similar indications?  Is there still a significant gap between centers and senior management? 

  
Yes . . . the economic downturn has driven enterprise organizations to look more to their contact center to add value added customer service, differentiated customer service.    But we continue to see a discrepancy between the amount of importance placed on the contact center/customer service and the amount of representation in senior leadership discussions where strategic long term decisions are made.

6. Avaya recently introduced their Avaya Interactive Voice and Video Response which combines voice and video content.  Please cite an example of this application. Also, in what time frame do you believe it will be adapted by users with some frequency? 

Mobile apps as well as kiosk are leading applications.  Customers considering IVVR are considering use of technology to provide more cost effective solutions to mobile users - these opportunities in the near term are overseas where 3G deployments are more mature. 

Here in US, a large mobile carrier is considering retail IVVR kiosks to compliment retail staff to handling technical support questions and issues - the sales people at the stores stay focused on selling new devices and service plans and can direct visiting customers to a kiosk "cube" where they connect live via video with a technical support person who helps diagnose issues with their phone and resolve them.  Overall, they see this initiative as a means to improve customer satisfaction, reduce phone returns, and keep sales focused on selling.

7. As a company with a strong international presence, which areas of the world do you anticipate the highest growth from? 

Emerging markets such as Russia, Eastern  Europe, Turkey, the Middle East, South Africa, Northern Africa, India,  China, and Brazil will offer the most call center growth over the next  three years.  The rapid GDP growth in these countries (annual rates of  6-9%), has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and created a  rapidly growing middle class.  This increasing income and wealth has  driven the rapid growth of mobile service coverage and mobile phone ownership, which in turn is fueling contact centers as the main channel of real time, low cost, convenient customer interaction

8. What has been the effect of the Silverlake and TPG Capital acquisition in October, 2007? 

By going private, Avaya was able to take a longer term view of our investments. We no longer have to report quarterly results, which enables us to make changes that give us a longer horizon to show results. This has provided Avaya with the ability to act with greater flexibility and improve our focus. It also lets us accelerate the changes we want to make as our business sets its sights on three key areas – unified communications, contact centers and the small-medium enterprise market.