Market Perspectives

The 15th annual Ventana Research Digital Leadership Awards recognize organizations and individuals that utilize technology to advance business and IT. The Awards showcase professional leadership and their use of business applications or technology that led to improved efficiency, productivity and performance. These leaders and pioneers have contributed to their organization’s success and championed improvements across people, processes, information and technology.

Ventana Research has awarded Chris Bain at Avaya its 2022 Digital Leadership Award in Marketing for using Upland Software and Salesforce to capture customer experience information and use it to influence the customer buying cycle. This award recognizes the individual, organization and vendor that best exemplifies leadership in the technologies that support marketing. All finalists in the Marketing expertise area were considered for this prestigious award.

The marketing function has a significant opportunity to maximize the demand for an organization's products and services by adopting innovative processes and technologies. This transformation starts with an exploration of digital commerce and marketing processes that facilitate the presentation of products and services using predictive and robotic technology. With newly available tools to connect with consumers and understand the voice of the customer, marketing can deliver an engaging and satisfying customer experience.

Ventana Research selected Avaya for the 15th Annual Digital Leadership Award in Marketing for its commitment to validating customer experiences with its software. Avaya is a global provider of communication platforms. The Avaya storytelling program was launched with the aim of capturing customer experiences with Avaya products and using that information to influence potential customers. Avaya built an application to source, process, distribute and track customer experiences anywhere in the world. Upland RO Innovation and Salesforce were selected to create a one-click operation inside Salesforce, web-based applications and web forms. The application captures the experiences that Avaya products enable, and their value to engage audiences. This new approach provided the ability to use customer experience information to influence the customer buying cycle.

Avaya and Chris Bain were selected as the Digital Leadership winner for using technology in an innovative way to benefit marketing efforts. Avaya is able to identify, nominate, process, distribute and track customer experiences, significantly increasing content production and reference recruitment to utilize in the sales process. The company is able to target and recommend different asset types to customers depending on their journey stage.

For organizations to remain competitive, marketing efforts must go beyond transformational and work towards innovation. Upland Software and Salesforce address the challenges of helping organizations manage essential marketing processes like customer references. Organizations that need to realize value from customer relationships will appreciate software that facilitates the process and blends with existing applications.

Organizations looking to maximize the value of business and technology investments across people and processes should consider how marketing can optimize its digital potential. If you have not examined how Upland Software and Salesforce can help your organization, it is well worth your time. Congratulations, Chris Bain at Avaya, for your leadership.

Ventana Research offers expertise and research-based guidance on how to utilize processes and applications to maximize the return on marketing investments. Change is required to maintain competitiveness and enable business resilience and marketing readiness to achieve the outcomes your organization deserves.