Avaya's Verticalisation Mantra: Co-Creation

Anil Nair, president, Avaya Global Connect, shares the company’s verticalisation strategy with Biztech2.0.

Which industry verticals are important for Avaya?

The main spenders in terms of IT are the ITeS, BFSI and other similar segments. Avaya believes in engaging deeply with them and determining how ICT solutions can be deployed in these segments in order to derive benefits for both parties. Once these communication solutions are put to good use in these segments the result is acceleration and growth of business.

Is Avaya developing vertical specific solutions?

It is important to look at what is appropriate for each vertical and align with their strategies. When the business strategy of the organisation is aligned with its communications strategy, the company can garner true benefits. It is a matter of customising the platforms as appropriate for each segment. For instance, in the BFSI sector, there is a lot of thrust on rural penetration, but at the same time it is not possible for the bank to have experts in every rural location that it goes to. Instead, there are kiosks available from where people can access a subject matter expert and solve their queries. In this manner, the bank can achieve its objective of reaching rural areas and also make experts accessible for their customers without incurring additional costs that they would normally have to.

What is Avaya’s strategy for verticalisation?

We want to focus on the pain-points of each vertical. You can always sell products that you already have, however, in such a case the capital spent does not get expended appropriately, it is underutilised and the organisation is unable to reap maximum benefits from the input. Our strategy is not to focus on the product but focus on the pain-points that it tries to resolve. When we focus on what the customer really needs, as well as the customers’ customers, then I feel it’s a meaningful dialogue with the companies.

We have a customer studio to help us realise this strategy. This studio has two parts. The first is where we showcase the solutions to the customers in terms of how they actually work. We believe in experiential selling. The second part is the co-creation lab, where we invite our customers and have a dialogue as to how solutions can be appropriately deployed and how they can be customised and adapted to various situations.

What is the utility of co-creating solutions?

The whole idea of the co-creation lab is to arrive at the core value proposition that we are offering to the customer, keeping in mind his/her customers too. If there is an inherent value proposition then the company gains from it. We are trying to make sure that the value proposition is well articulated, there is sufficient knowledge of why the solution is being deployed, and the customer knows what the returns are going to be like.

How is Avaya accelerating business profitability?

With our Communications Enabled Business Process (CEBP), we are able to sense the outages in advance, send out alerts as appropriate and involve people in conversations as and when required. This is to avert any future outages. What usually happens is that organisations have multifarious things going on. There are decisions being taken every minute of the day and human latency usually takes over. Due to delayed decisions, there are outages and when you monetise those outages it amounts to a lot. Our solutions allow these outages to be precluded altogether.

What is Avaya’s India roadmap?

With verticalisation, we expect that we will be able to capture whatever opportunities there are in the market. Within each vertical, there are latent requirements. Our ambition is to speak to the concerned business people in each vertical and then co-create these solutions rather than wait for them to be suggested by the IT people in various industries. We will work with the business, uncover its latent demands and make sure that we are able to fulfill the same with solutions. Our aim is to provide steady growth and differentiation to the companies with our intervention.