Market Perspectives

We are happy to share some insights about Avaya drawn from our latest Value Index research, the 2023 Ventana Research Value Index: Customer Experience Management, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements.

In all of our Value Indexes, we utilize a structured research methodology built on evaluation categories designed to reflect real-world criteria and derived from RFP responses and a vendor selection process for analytics and business intelligence. We evaluated Avaya and 21 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product — Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability — and two related to the vendor — TCO/ROI and Vendor Validation. To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and on data derived from our Benchmark Research on Customer Experience (CX).

Avaya is a business communications service provider whose product offerings include a contact center and unified communications platform. Avaya was categorized as a Vendor of Assurance and ranked 14th overall in this Value Index evaluation. It performed best in TCO/ROI where it was a Value Index Leader, placing second. Avaya also ranked well in Manageability (seventh place) and Usability (eighth place).

Avaya’s strength is as a Contact-Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) provider with long-standing expertise in routing customer interactions and managing the agent pool required for that function. To manage other CX-related resources, Avaya often relies on partner integrations with CRM or case tracking systems. Avaya’s solution has excellent features related to tracking and measuring interactions, and in adding functionality to areas like self-service where it leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and conversational intelligence to improve customer experiences.

Once you step outside of the contact center, however, the utility of Avaya customer experience management (CXM or CEM) declines. Its Capability ranking could improve with a comprehensive set of metrics or analysis for sales or marketing teams. Improvements can also be made by aligning its robust contact center analytics tools towards metrics that reflect CX outcomes rather than just the standard, activity-based performance KPIs that reflect agent behavior.

Avaya’s solid ranking in TCO/ROI is partially due to its efforts to provide buyers with business cases and tools to measure product value. Its ranking on Vendor Validation (15th place) is impacted by to uncertainty on corporate and financial direction and leadership team stability, as well as its ability to invest in its products and corporate efforts.

This assessment was based on Avaya’s CXM products available in August of 2022. The company made some minor updates in a December 2022 release. Avaya, like all vendors in this space, should continue working towards a holistic, integrated CX platform that addresses the needs of users across the enterprise. Connecting workflows from marketing, sales and service teams should be a key priority.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of CXM software in the industry. Technology buyers can learn more about how to use our Value Index by clicking here and included vendors that wish to learn more can click here. Read the report here.