Why Enterprises Need Innovation Without Disruption

At the beginning of February, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) raised its global growth forecasts for the year, based on a stronger-than-expected start to 2023. It’s great to see some of the doom-and-gloom predicted at the end of 2022 being proven wrong. But there are plenty of headwinds that large enterprises across key verticals still face.

For example, news that stronger-than-expected consumption and investment will improve US GDP growth projections is set against the fact that manufacturing activity across the US, Europe and Asia contracted again in at the start of the year. Add in Eurozone economic sentiment, which is at its highest as key APAC markets like South Korea and Indonesia are seeing growth heavily slow. And I haven’t even mentioned the possibility of localized disasters.

This fragility of the economic environment is driving organizations to innovate without heavily impacting existing investments. So, if they weren’t sold on full-stack moves to the cloud before, they are even less likely to consider the idea now. Instead, businesses are looking to preserve what they already have and strengthen where they can within existing platforms.

The benefits of this are obvious. If you’re an end-user-facing company – such as a bank or a telecoms provider, you’re under pressure to deliver the experiences that your customers demand. According to Gartner, as banks seek to improve the customer experience while reducing the workloads of human agents, 70% of their customer interactions are set to involve technologies such as machine-learning, chatbots or mobile messaging.

The challenge is that many of these capabilities are best consumed through cloud technology. And moving the entire contact center, with all its finely tuned integrations into the core banking application, would be an enormous (and expensive) task. It’s becoming more preferable to find a way to integrate those capabilities into an existing contact center stack.

This challenge of getting that balance right spans industries. Healthcare providers are under pressure to deliver better patient experiences that involve clear, seamless communications at every stage of the healthcare journey. Recent research commissioned by Avaya found that 84% of Middle East healthcare executives believe that patients will switch healthcare providers if they don’t receive a fantastic experience. But capital expenditure budgets aside, they’re often limited by compliance or data privacy policies in their use of cloud-based communications stacks.

The good news – for Avaya customers at least – is that Avaya is one of the few technology providers capable of delivering the sort of innovation without disruption that the economic times demand. And deliver it on a global scale.

For example, a major global manufacturing company recently renewed a new five-year agreement with Avaya. The new contract will give 120,000 users, already being served by an Avaya infrastructure, access to new unified communications capabilities. It will also see the company roll out a hybrid cloud-based contact center and see the creation of smart alarm services in plants – all with zero disruption to existing operations.

In the US, we’re speaking to a top global bank about how they can move tens of thousands of concurrent contact center agents to the cloud. That sort of scale requires more consideration than simply changing the consumption model – the journey needs to be meticulously mapped out to ensure that existing service levels remain high.

The global economy may be doing better than many anticipated back in December, but the IMF still warns the world could fall into a recession this year. The most successful large organizations will be those who learn to use what they have more smartly, while integrating the innovations their customers demand on top.