4 minute read
Digital transformations
Digital transformations
Avaya International explains what it takes to be a market leader. Following their victory at the Banker Middle East Industry Awards 2018, Yaser Alzubaidi, Digital Engagement Solutions Sales Leader at Avaya International, caught up with Banker Middle East to talk about how they can help businesses in the Middle East to up their game.
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Yaser Alzubaidi
What makes Avaya the leader in communications software? “Avaya helps organisations around the world succeed by integrating communications with business strategy and operations. Our expertise and experience in this area enables us to shape intelligent connections, creating seamless communication experiences for our customers and their customers.
“In recent years, we’ve focused on software, services and devices for organisations of all sizes. We recognise that the unique needs of a start-up, a global enterprise or a government ministry. We work accordingly to deliver customisable solutions that offer organisations unparalleled flexibility as they evolve in a digital world.”
What is unique about Avaya’s offerings? “We are the customer experience experts. We’ve earned this reputation by taking a holistic approach in helping organisations to better engage with their audiences. Today we sit at the nexus of connectivity for the enterprise with more than 130,000 customers in 220,000 locations worldwide, serving over 90 per cent of the Fortune 500, with more than 100 million users around the world.
“We believe that Avaya’s heritage, expertise, and technology make us well-positioned to guide the future of connectivity. Today we’ve also successfully transitioned to a software and services-led organisation; providing solutions through a highly-flexible approach whether hosted on-premise, delivered through the cloud, or in a hybrid model.
“We also appreciate that success is not achieved alone. We have invested heavily in development and orchestration platforms that give our partners and our customers many of the same tools as our own R&D teams. These Avaya platforms are based on next-generation, open approaches that contrast to the monolithic structures used by many of our competitors.”
What advantages can a global provider offer a regional bank or business? “Within the region’s banking sector, a world-class customer experience can often be your greatest competitive edge. Understanding the customer is the only way to plan for long-term growth.
“We recently conducted a study with IDC in which one of the outtakes was that digital transformation success fundamentally relies on customer experience. Organisations that focus their digital transformation efforts on improving customer experience—as well as employee productivity—have the highest growth from a profit and revenue perspective.
“Bringing more than 25 years of international experience to the table, we are preferred partners to organisations in a range of industries, from banking and financial services to government and public safety, healthcare, hospitality, telecommunications and more.
How can financial institutions in the Middle East improve their customers’ experience through digital innovation, and what are your most popular products for financial institutions in the Middle East? “Ultimately, we help banks to deliver convenient, personalised services through mobile and digital channels. This supports them to attract the most tech savvy of consumers. As the line between the physical and digital branch continues to blur, our solutions take friction out of the customer journey and enable seamless transactions
across any channel. We also leverage powerful collaboration tools, social media, and HD video to maximise banks’ highly-skilled resources.
“These capabilities are supported by a range of omni-channel customer engagement technologies. In particular, our Avaya Breeze real-time collaboration and application-development platform has proven especially valuable to banks with a clear digital transformation mandate. Using Avaya Breeze, banks can easily build apps from reusable parts, integrate their communications apps with other business processes, or even start from scratch in designing their own omnichannel customer experience.”
How can corporations in the Middle East better prepare for the digital transformation, and what are the latest innovations you see in customer experience? “For us, the conversation is not just about technology but what you do with it. Technology is an enabler, not an end in itself. In fact, the issue we see most often in working with local partners is that digital transformation projects are mostly viewed as just IT transformation projects.
“We believe the days of leading with IT products are clearly over. When it comes to the digital transformation of business communications, IT and the lines-of-business need to share the ownership of initiatives to ensure that the value of the transformation is fully realised. This goes from employee training all the way out to customer feedback.”
What are the major challenges for regional financial institutions in terms of technology? “At Avaya, we work collaboratively with partners and customers to understand their real business requirements and identify their pain points. For example, in a recent study we conducted, we found that around 40 per cent of banking customers in the UAE and KSA would likely change their banks if customer service was poor. The bulk of respondents in these countries also prefer to utilise digital self-service channels to access banking services. This is where new technologies can really make a difference—helping customers do what they want to do as fast and effectively as possible.
How will emerging technologies help to shape economies in the Middle East? “The Middle East’s transformation to digital is already having real consequences. People now expect anytime, anywhere responses for local businesses. Smart businesses must also now predict customer needs faster and with more accuracy than ever before. The reality is that companies now rise and fall based on how they communicate with and among their customers, employees, investors, regulators and other stakeholders.
“Emerging technologies play a critical role in this communication. By applying more advanced artificial intelligence, analytics, blockchain and IoT applications to this process, we are able to help organisations create additional value in today’s digital age.”
