Calimax, DIRECTV, Palace Resorts, and Walmart are examples of how the region accelerated its transformation with its own recipe that combines the cloud, APIs and mobiles.
Avaya, a world leader in solutions to improve and simplify communications and collaboration, brought together 6,000 executives from Latin America at its annual Avaya Engage 2021 event in virtual format, who shared examples of the present and future of business communications. Summarizing the company’s vision of customer outcomes, Avaya CEO Jim Chirico considered the past 18 months as “amazing”.
“Latin America often looks for cutting edge solutions long before other areas and we see significant innovation in the region”, said Chirico. According to the executive, Latin America has undergone rapid digital transformation in key sectors for several years and that trend has accelerated greatly in recent months. “That is why we continue to implement new solutions here, to meet the demands of our customers and partners”, he added.
According to Chirico, “an example of this is Calimax, a Mexican retail company, our first global implementation of Avaya OneCloud CCaaS (contact center as a service), who have seen an increase in their monthly internet sales using our digital channels in more than 1,200%”.
Chirico explained that although Avaya has been working for more than three years to offer conversational artificial intelligence capabilities through APIs (programmable components), companies such as Calimax are giving a new push to the digitization of transactions in Latin America through a difference with other regions: using WhatsApp to serve customers on their mobiles. Among the top 6 countries where customers prefer it, 5 are from Latin America, according to an Avaya survey.
Chirico explained that “Avaya technology provides the opportunity to offer our clients the ability to integrate with any artificial intelligence provider, be it Microsoft, Google, AWS or IBM, adding to our strategic alliances the ability to enrich solutions with ease and flexibility, really driving composable use cases”, where companies innovate by combining software from different vendors.
Other companies, such as Walmart Mexico, talked about how they went from a traditional retail model to picking up home deliveries during the pandemic using the contact center.
DIRECTV talked about how they moved quickly to seize the opportunity during the pandemic. They have massive contact centers in South America and they also explained how they continued and accelerated their digital transformation during these times.
Palace Resorts, from the hospitality vertical, showed how the software allowed using technology during the pandemic and how they digitally transformed the company to take advantage of this opportunity. According to Avaya CMO Simon Harrison, the world has changed not only because of the pandemic, but it has seen a greater evolution in the last decade than in any previous one. He said that we are officially in a booming experience economy with great potential where the biggest challenge is in the applications.
Harrison said Avaya provides the OneCloud artificial intelligence platform and delivers speed to generate value through existing applications that customers want. The great contribution for Calimax and other clients in Latin America is that it is a platform that is offered “as a service” in the cloud. So Avaya helps companies around the world create experiences, become a composable company based on that technology.
The consulting firm Gartner predicts that communication platforms such as Avaya’s (CPaaS) will be ready to become a core skill within the technical engineering team in more than 90% of companies by 2023. The consultancy added that Businesses that take a composable enterprise approach to their technology strategy will outperform the competition by 80% for providing experiences that customers really want. On the main challenges for 2022, Harrison highlighted that today there are more opportunities than ever in the way in which customers and partners are supported through digital solutions using the right platform and the right underlying technology to create a space of digital work.
The world needs a platform that offers 3 things: speed to use applications; technology partnerships like with Google where we work closely to accelerate value by combining our technologies; and finally, innovation to the limit. “Avaya is setting the pace for this industry and the benefits of multi-experience. In simple terms, we are presenting the real world solution for today’s needs”, said the executive.
According to Galib Karim, Avaya’s Global Vice President for Latin America, last year was a fantastic year for the company in the region and he stated that he was very proud of what customers are doing with Avaya technology, noting that this happened with both small companies and medium, large companies and governments.
“Our partners are very important in the Latin American region and it is crucial that we work with them to provide all the solutions. Besides that, we have technological alliances in operation such as Microsoft, Google or Salesforce, helping us to complement the solution to a new development of complete solutions for the market”, he concluded.
