Businesses need to provide excellent customer service and engagement even during times of crisis. Avaya OneCloud™ CPaaS helps businesses build that resiliency, writes Davide Petramala.
Davide Petramala, Director of Avaya OneCloud CPaaS
A disaster or crisis accentuates the link between customer engagement and business success. “Challenging times such as those encountered during the pandemic basically disconnected this common pattern where customers can physically see you and engage in your business,” says Davide Petramala, Director of Avaya OneCloud CPaaS at Avaya, an international technology company specializing in cloud communications and workstream collaboration solutions. “Suddenly businesses found themselves competing with thousands of other online options with staff all working from home.”
Despite disruptions, businesses can survive and even grow. “Stats show that the ones that thrive focus on the business of customer engagement, where customers are the center of their business,” says Petramala. “Those businesses are seeing higher profits and faster growth because each customer represents not only more revenue, but also more commitment and loyalty.”
Why great customer service and a great customer experience are essential for success
Even in non-crisis times, great customer service and customer experience are essential to business success. Recognizing this, businesses are increasingly putting customers at the center of their business model, instead of at the end of the supply chain. “Customer engagement and experience are no longer side pieces, but the focus of your business if you want to succeed,” says Petramala.
A happy customer is more likely to become a long-term customer and to share the good experience with others. Conversely, the negative impact on a brand from a bad experience can be exponential. “They say that for every positive experience, that customer will organically go and tell six other people, but for every negative one, they will tell 14,” says Petramala.
Shaping the business and its services around customer expectations is challenging. “What customers are asking for is dynamically changing,” says Petramala. To meet the challenge, today’s businesses need technology that’s flexible and responsive to constant change.
Technology as a service allows for flexibility and adaptation
The Avaya OneCloud ecosystem and its solutions are designed to do just that. The Avaya CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) is a composable platform that lets businesses take pre-built frameworks and modify them for their unique customer experience and engagement requirements.
Unlike in the past where companies invested in costly technology infrastructure only to see it soon become obsolete, a service like CPaaS enables them to adapt quickly to a customer’s ever-changing requirements without added expenses. “By purchasing a service instead of a product, companies are relieved from taking on any technical debt, and they can pick and choose the tools, customize them, and then modify them on demand based on their needs,” says Petramala.
Whether it’s compliance, health care, finance, or curbside pick-up, the business simply takes up the framework, embeds digital challenges, adds in AI, and can be up and running within weeks or even days. “Because it’s all based on AI, one can deploy the service, see the customer engagement in real-time, get feedback, and improve over each iteration,” says Petramala. “Having a composable system, with no technical infrastructure tied to any physical investment, means businesses can get a return on investment (ROI) on the technology while actually using it. That allows businesses to exceed customer expectations, so they don’t just survive but thrive in chaotic times.”
To help businesses identify their customer engagement pain points, Avaya runs free workshops.
