Large enterprises know Avaya well: We have a successful track record of designing, building and deploying the world’s most complex and customized communications solutions for the world’s best-known brands. In recent years, we’ve steadily taken those large products and virtualized them into standard modules for the midmarket, helping unlock value for the world’s fastest-growing companies.
Midmarket customers and large enterprises have the same goal–to improve engagement between team members and customers.
Whenever I speak at industry events, I often get asked two questions: “What does engagement mean for my business,” and “Why is Avaya investing in the midmarket?” I’d like to address those two questions today, so potential customers and partners can understand Avaya’s perspective on the challenges and opportunities presented by the midmarket—and the reason why we’re committed to serving this market segment.
What Does Engagement Mean For My Business?
Here at Avaya, we provide a comprehensive portfolio of solutions to drive simple, human-centric communication and collaboration deep into business processes, which ultimately helps create business value.
Traditionally, we have categorized our products under three umbrellas: Unified Communications, Contact Center and Networking (with a robust set of professional services to simplify planning, deployment, configuration and management of these products).
The problem is, these labels succeed at describing what our solutions do, not how, why or where they do it. These contextual questions get at the ways our solutions create business value and hone our customers’ competitive edge.
Technology has fundamentally changed the way we interact. Those changes are reflected at work, and with our customers. Avaya’s history has been centered around improving human connections, delighting customers and energizing employees.
This is the essence of engagement. Our solutions don’t just make it easy for an employee or customer to reach an expert or a salesperson; we enable a business outcome by making it easier for these potential communicators to access expertise and acquire goods and services.
We refer to this context-aware communication and collaboration as engagement—the active connection of team members and customers with the information, experts, and decision-makers they need to complete the task at hand.
Our Team and Customer Engagement solutions drive faster, more natural, and more focused communications and collaboration, and ultimately drive customer satisfaction and revenue.
Why is Avaya Investing in the Midmarket?
The midmarket (defined as companies with 100 to 2,000 employees) is the growth engine of the global economy, representing about a third of the world’s GDP, and growing twice as fast as large enterprise companies. Moving at this pace requires nimble, agile, aware processes and decision-making, enabled by the kind of Team and Customer Engagement solutions available from Avaya.
Midmarket companies often rely on consumer-grade cloud solutions to enable their communications and collaboration. While these solutions are easy to adopt and quick to initiate, they often lack the ability to integrate with business applications and processes, presenting threats to data security and communications privacy. Avaya CEO Kevin Kennedy explored this topic in his recent white paper, “The New Rules of Engagement: How to Succeed in 21st Century Business Communications,” where he cautioned business owners against launching siloed products with consumer-grade data protection in place.
For every widely-publicized corporate data breach, there are many others that are quietly handled outside of the public’s eye. Data breaches can be catastrophic for growing businesses, and Kennedy urged companies to take a closer look at how data is shared among applications, internally with team members, externally with partners and across the corporate network infrastructure.
Midmarket companies have a great deal to gain from adopting engagement solutions. Roughly half of midsize companies are moving toward a single, consolidated UC solution, and approximately a third consider ease-of-management and ease-of-integration as key purchase criteria. Avaya delivers secure, reliable, dependable and easy-to-manage engagement solutions that can be connected to business applications and processes via open standard APIs.
Decades of experiences have informed our R&D teams as they’ve developed solutions for the midmarket. Virtualizing these market-leading solutions ensures engagement can be deployed virtually anywhere.
Engagement is the future of business communications, and we believe we’re uniquely positioned to lead this market into the future. Midmarket companies have a tremendous amount at stake in adopting engagement solutions because they depend on nimble business decisions to compete and win. We’re committed to building the world’s best engagement solutions for the midmarket.
For more on the midmarket and engagement, read the recent white paper from Avaya CTO Laurent Philonenko, “The New Rules of Engagement for Midsize Businesses.”
