Avaya, a global leader in solutions to enhance and simplify communications and collaboration, through hybrid cloud deployments, transforms on-premises solutions for organizations and their contact centers so they can experience technology innovation without disruption to their existing operations. Embracing a hybrid cloud model with Avaya contact center and cloud-based solutions enables organizations to chart their hybrid cloud course to the modern contact center while experiencing its advantages including flexibility, allowing organizations to take advantages of the known cloud benefits.

As the contact center industry continues to evolve, many platform vendors are transitioning to cloud offerings. However, some organizations have legitimate concerns about the pace and consequences of making a wholesale cloud migration. According to a recent, Avaya-sponsored Ventana Research¹ white paper ⁠— Migration to the Hybrid Cloud, Innovation for the Modern Contact Center, authored by Keith Dawson, VP and Research Director, 39 percent of organizations prefer on-premises analytics and data deployment. When faced with technology advances and the pressure to adopt an all-or-nothing complete solution to stay current, organizations can encounter challenges of fully migrating to the cloud such as a disruptive and often costly ‘rip-and-replace’, long deployment cycles, and resource dedication. However, organizations can innovate without disruption.

“Innovation starts with ideation and follows through with implementation, but current investments shouldn’t be abandoned in the name of innovation,” said Tim Sherwood, GVP of Product and Offer Management, Avaya. “The innovation journey to optimize your contact center, and simplify your customer experience, doesn’t necessarily need to be a full cloud transition. While this might be the right move for some organizations, others prefer to keep their current on-premises contact center. Companies today need to move at a pace and path that fits their business needs.”

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Avaya Experience Platform is a powerful cloud solution that helps create memorable experiences for today’s customers—and the employees who serve them—from any location. Organizations can easily connect everything—voice, video, chat, messaging, and more—to deliver effortless experiences for customers and employees at every touchpoint across cloud while retaining their on-premises solutions. These tools make every interaction a positive experience for customers and employees alike by:

• Infuse AI throughout customer and employee journeys to deliver intelligent experiences and deepen connections.
• Empower employees to provide quality interactions across voice and digital channels—all in a single desktop view.
• Monitor performance analytics to help employees reach peak performance and provide feedback in real time.
• Create customer experience superstars by matching employees’ unique skills with customer needs.

“In today’s uncertain economic environment, many organizations would like to take advantage of advanced contact center technology but are wary of the cost and disruption of a full shift to the cloud,” said Keith Dawson, VP & Research Director of CX at Ventana Research. “In those cases, a hybrid deployment model makes a great deal of sense.”

A hybrid model gives organizations access to innovative features without the disruption of throwing away what works. Existing investments can be enhanced with new cloud capabilities at a measured pace, according to organizational preferences. In essence, a hybrid deployment can be seen as a migration, rather than a transformation.

Canada’s largest propane supplier, Superior Propane, wanted to improve customer retention and reduce average handle times. Avaya, through its strategic partner alliance with Calabrio, a customer experience intelligence company that empowers organizations to enrich human interactions, helped solve this challenge and improved their contact center experience. The customer leveraged Calabrio’s desktop and speech analytics capabilities to get an in-depth understanding of current processes and how they were impacting the customer experience. Superior Propane was able to reduce average handle time by 30 seconds per call without needing to scale its team, support a permanent hybrid work model and up level Customer Experience with custom integrations and proactive communications.

“The capabilities of Avaya enable us to communicate with customers in ways we never have before,” said Alex Wozniak, Director of Customer Enablement at Superior Propane. “Avaya challenged us to think outside the box with how we handle these calls. Offering the option to schedule a delivery through an automated system is not only efficient, but a preferred method for some customers. That’s when we decided to move forward with the custom integration for self-service.”

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