Avaya CEO highlights accelerating market momentum in India fueled by interest in AI-powered customer experience innovations
Avaya, a global leader in customer experience solutions, announced that it is witnessing an accelerated momentum for its solutions in India, particularly among enterprises looking to infuse artificial intelligence into customer experience.
On his first visit to India since taking over as Avaya CEO, Alan Masarek said India is a key growth engine for Avaya worldwide with significant demand coming from domestic clients and Avaya partners. Avaya counts Airtel, State Bank of India (SBI), and the Government of India among its key customers in India. Its contact center solutions are used for the National Emergency Response Services (100, 112) and India’s Aadhaar system.
During the visit, Masarek reported that Avaya has a significant share in both government and private sector enterprises, spanning public services, healthcare, BFSI, telecoms, and business process outsourcing. He also highlighted the AI-focused innovations being driven by Avaya’s R&D teams based in Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, and Gurugram. A third of Avaya’s 1,700 engineers are based in India.
“Our R&D teams in India are a key source of innovation for Avaya worldwide, especially as enterprises embrace AI-powered innovations that can help them redefine customer experiences,” said Alan Masarek, CEO of Avaya. “Our momentum in this market further drives Avaya’s global growth as Indian businesses and government agencies continue to rely on Avaya as their trusted customer experience and communications technology partner.”
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Generative AI Top Driver of Customer Experience Innovation
Masarek noted that Indian enterprises, like their global counterparts, are increasingly seeing their contact centers as enablers for driving differentiating experiences for their end-customers. As more customers are looking to ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies, they are seeking an integrator to bring it all together, and Avaya is well-positioned to play that role especially as the contact center incumbent.
Further, Indian enterprises are drawn to Avaya because of the company’s unique approach that allows businesses to access cloud “innovation without disruption” enabling customers to deploy cloud-based innovation on top of current communications investments. The Avaya Experience Platform, which provides an AI-powered contact center as a service platform, has strong momentum with customers as they embrace the Avaya approach of enabling companies to innovate at their own pace as their unique needs require.
“I’m proud to say that Avaya is rock-solid. I’ve seen systems with 13 years of uptime without a reboot. Avaya helps people succeed by providing them with the tools they need to manage their goals and hit their targets. The core strength of Avaya is the reporting, super stability. If we can extend those benefits to CCaaS, that’s the dream,” said Andrew Sundareson, Senior Vice President – Technology, at [24]7.ai.
Avaya recently released Avaya Experience Platform Connect, which empowers organizations to leverage their existing on-premises infrastructure for voice routing, call handling, and more, while accessing omnichannel voice and digital channels, as well as AI capabilities, from the cloud.
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Investments in Skill Training
Masarek noted that Avaya’s commitment to India goes beyond serving its local customers to investing in community development – enhancing the quality of education, utilizing technology to improve access to health and education, building livelihood capacity and providing humanitarian relief.
Consistent with that focus on community development and recognizing that we must equip youth with skills that will enhance their employability and enable them to adapt to the ever-evolving job market, Masarek announced a new partnership with the Magic Bus India Foundation, one of the top five NGOs in the education space in India. Avaya has committed over 5 million rupees to support the development of a youth skilling center in Hyderabad. That, combined with Avaya’s expertise in the local customer experience space, will help to train 200 adolescents from underprivileged backgrounds as part of a ‘CX Academy,’ helping them to get their start in the industry.