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Oracle Customer Success—Avaya Inc.

Avaya Inc.

Avaya Doubles Net Promoter Score, Enhances Customer Experience, and Looks to Cut IT Maintenance Costs by 30% with Cloud Solutions

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We wanted a solution that takes our customers seamlessly from lead generation to customer service. It had to be built on open standards, cloud-based, and something that could help us connect all the dots. Oracle cloud solutions delivered on these requirements and more.

— Fari Ebrahimi, Senior Vice President and Global CIO, Avaya Inc.
Avaya’s unified communications and collaboration, contact center, and customer experience management solutions improve engagement between customers, teams, employees, and partners to boost efficiency and quickly address critical business challenges. In its quest to “put the customer first,” Avaya launched a three-year transformation program that enables it to view the complete relationship with each customer, understand their individual needs, and follow the end-to-end customer lifecycle—from lead generation to order placement to customer service. Avaya has a network of more than 10,500 partners, which accounts for more than 70% of its revenue; therefore, this important channel had to be central to the company’s transformation initiative.

“Our vision required us to transform from a hardware-centric company to a software services-solutions-centric model. We have to introduce solutions that really help the business, and we have to move fast. Cloud solutions were, therefore, essential to our path forward,” said Fari Ebrahimi, senior vice president and global CIO, Avaya Inc.

Avaya worked closely with Oracle to create a cloud solution based on open standards. The resulting cloud solution incorporates Oracle Sales Cloud, Oracle Marketing Cloud, Oracle Social, Oracle Database Cloud Service, Oracle Java Cloud Service, and Oracle Integration Cloud Service products. Avaya is gaining deeper insight into its customers so it can serve them better, already doubling its Net Promoter Score (NPS). In addition, the company is gaining greater agility and anticipates cutting IT maintenance costs by 30% with its cloud solutions.
  • Strengthening Partner Ties
    Given the scope and importance of its partner ecosystem, Avaya requires a robust partner engagement management system. The company’s legacy, cloud-based partner management system was highly customized and Avaya had spent significant time and resources—and created millions of lines of code—to achieve the functionality required. Over the years, costs and risk continued to grow due to the complexity of the solution.

    Avaya wanted a solution that would enable partners to take customers from lead generation, through order placement and provisioning, to customer service. The solution had to be cloud-based and built on open-standards to ensure flexible integration and business agility.

    “Oracle Cloud solutions delivered on our requirements as they enable us to quickly create an innovative process that is completely, or in our case, partially in the cloud and partially in our legacy systems. Oracle Integration Cloud makes it easy to connect the two worlds together,” Ebrahimi said. “We are connecting our back-office systems, which include SAP on-premises applications, Oracle Marketing Cloud, and Oracle Sales Cloud (forming the foundation of our new partnership relationship management solutions), with our electronic data processing system in our own cloud.”

    In building its new partner engagement management solution, Avaya looked to reduce customizations, and Oracle stepped up to assist.

    “Oracle was willing to cover basically 80% of our previous customization in a base product, enhancing its partner relationship management offering in the last few releases to basically match many of our requirements. This, in turn, will save us significant costs and effort in the short and long term,” Ebrahimi said. “We are estimating a 30% reduction in our ongoing IT maintenance costs.”

    Avaya is using Oracle Java Cloud Service to facilitate seamless integration between Oracle Cloud environments and its on-premises SAP applications as well as other environments, including Salesforce.com. “We can now flex quickly and move at the speed of opportunity since we do not have to do customizations in 20 different locations. For example, we integrated with our SAP enterprise resource planning environment using Oracle Integration Cloud Service products to enable us to seamlessly handle billing and provisioning,” Ebrahimi said.
  • Cultivating Customer Loyalty
    Even before its partner engagement management initiative, Avaya was not a stranger to Oracle cloud solutions—already benefitting from Oracle Marketing Cloud and Oracle Social Cloud to improve interactions with current and prospective customers.

    When Avaya embarked on its three-year transformation initiative, it adopted the NPS as a yardstick for progress in improving the customer experience and boosting loyalty. This is especially important for a company that specializes in solutions that help organizations collaborate and improve engagement with their customers. At the start of the three-year transformation initiative, its scores were in the low 20s today Avaya’s score is 56, a very strong benchmark and impressive achievement. According to Ebrahimi, Oracle Marketing Cloud and Oracle Social Cloud, in combination with Oracle Knowledge for Contact Center and Oracle’s Siebel Contact Center, were important factors in the company’s NPS improvement. The solutions are now connecting the sales conversation to the prospect’s conversation to the call center conversation—creating a seamless experience.

    For a business-to-business enterprise, Avaya has a strong social media following, with more than 32,000 Facebook fans and nearly 30,000 Twitter followers. The company required a tool to bring all of its social analytics together in one place, and Oracle Social Relationship Management Cloud delivered a scalable, reliable, and robust solution.

    As important, the organization is gaining greater insight into current and potential customers with Oracle Social Cloud. “Do our current and potential customers know us and what we do? Do we have the right followers on social media and how effective are we at reaching and influencing key audiences via social?” Ebrahimi asked.
  • Creating a Solid Knowledge Foundation
    Building a solid knowledge platform was essential to Avaya’s efforts to improve the customer experience. The company wanted to provide faster and more informed support to business customers, whose geographically dispersed, 24/7 workforces depend on Avaya’s communications solutions. Avaya also looked to improve collaboration and content reuse to enable more efficient service and problem solving.

    Avaya deployed Oracle Knowledge for Contact Center and integrated it with Oracle’s Siebel Contact Center to significantly improve the effectiveness and efficiency of its customer support function. The company significantly accelerated resolution rates thanks to improved knowledgebase search functionality and an expanded content library. In addition, it became easier for engineers and technical support personnel to self-publish content that their colleagues and customers can use to efficiently resolve future issues— improving productivity and customer service across the support function.
  • Jumpstarting Innovation with Cloud
    Oracle Cloud Platform is delivering newfound agility to Avaya—with Oracle Cloud Platform, the company can spin up new environments in minutes, without the direct costs and labor involved in a traditional on-premises environment.

    “Traditionally, when creating a new platform, you would have to buy a server, configure it, load it, and then later update and patch it. That cycle takes a lot of time and effort,” Ebrahimi said. “With Oracle Cloud Platform, we simply request a new environment and can have it in minutes, complete with servers, storage, database, middleware, and more. For our production environment, we can scale on demand. If we need to add another 500 partners tomorrow, it’s no problem. This is a huge benefit to any modern organization.”

    “People talk about innovation, transformation, and evolution, but rarely do we talk about the human beings that are part of that equation. I think we have an opportunity with the cloud and with some of our engagement solutions to change that equation—bringing the human experience front and center and really optimizing collaboration. Some of the new cloud technologies take us to a place we have never been before, where we innovate at unprecedented speed and in a way that continuously enhances the customer experience. At the end of the day, the customer is number one, and we are focused intently on finding new ways to serve them better.”
 
Business Challenge
  • Gain a comprehensive view of each of Avaya’s customer relationships, understand individual needs, and follow the end-to-end customer lifecycle—from lead generation to order placement to customer service
  • Enhance the customer experience and satisfaction as measured via the NPS
  • Improve ability to manage and support a network of more than 10,500 partners, which accounts for more than 70% of the communications company’s revenue
Results
  • Developed a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution that incorporates Oracle Cloud solutions to gain deeper insight into Avaya’s customers to serve them better—contributing to the company’s increase in its NPS from the low 20s to 56
  • Provided faster and more informed support to business customers, whose geographically dispersed, 24/7 workforces depend on Avaya’s communications solutions—thanks to improved knowledgebase search functionality and an expanded content library
  • Planned to replace its existing partner engagement management platform, significantly increase functionality, and roll the Oracle solution out globally in less than a year—a significant improvement over the seven-year implementation timeline for its legacy system
  • Prepared to roll out the new partner engagement platform to more than 10,500 partners and 5,000 internal users—impacting more than a half million customers
  • Tracked to reduce IT maintenance costs by 30% with Oracle Cloud solutions
  • Facilitated seamless integration between Oracle Cloud environments and Avaya’s on-premises SAP applications, as well as other environments, including Salesforce.com, with Oracle Java Cloud Service
  • Benefitted from the PaaS environment as the company can spin up new environments in minutes, without the direct costs and labor involved in a traditional on-premises environment
More
 

We selected Oracle because its marketing, social, and sales cloud solutions are especially suited for our focus on our partners. As important, Oracle was eager to work with us to adapt the solutions to ensure an end-to-end experience from lead through service.

— Fari Ebrahimi, Senior Vice President and Global CIO, Avaya Inc.

Execution

The strong working relationship between Avaya and Oracle has been instrumental in the success of Avaya’s cloud journey.

“Oracle is helping us in this implementation not only as a cloud service provider, but also as a resource in partnering with our system integrator—Infosys—to document what needs to be done from a requirements perspective,” Ebrahimi said. “When we looked at Oracle Cloud solutions, the roadmap was comprehensive, but we had a few additional requirements that we brought to the table. Oracle was willing to add several of our requirements to their roadmap and deliver them quickly, allowing us to eliminate many customizations. We’re making great progress to deliver the project on time and in budget. This is the type of partnership we're looking for from any cloud service provider, and Oracle is an exemplary one.”
Avaya plans to launch its new partner engagement management system in early 2016, starting in Europe, then focusing on Asia Pacific, and finally go live in the Americas.

About Avaya Inc.

Headquarters

 
Santa Clara, California, United States

Employees

 
12,000

Annual Revenue

 
$1 to $5 Billion

Partners

Oracle Solutions Used

Oracle Database Cloud Service
Oracle Java Cloud Service
Oracle Integration Cloud Service
Oracle Sales Cloud
Oracle Marketing Cloud
Published:  Mar 03, 2016