Avaya hangs up on users with fewer than 200 SaaSy contact center seats Avaya has advised customers and resellers of a planned “evolution” of its products that starts with a requirement to license at least 200 seats worth of its SaaS-y contact center wares by June 30, 2025. A message to partners explains that the change is needed “To meet enterprise needs to innovate and orchestrate seamless …
"There's nothing more seamless than being told that you have to pay more for the same service . . ."
So you reckon the poor customer is being "stitched up" then? Sewn into a body bag to be later jettisoned.
Seamless I guess in the sense that if the proposals aren't adjoining or attached then there is no seam just a gulf or gap.
It's actually a cost-cutting exercise due to falling demand as more and more companies move to WebRTC. Avaya went into bankruptcy years ago and has been "restructuring" since then.
Much as we've all got used to the various WebRTC systems for replacing phones, companies would be advised to consider their dependency on suppliers, particularly Microsoft.
I know you were fighting against an overload of corporate PR speak while you were writing this article Simon, but shouldn't:
> The latter change perhaps hints that maybe contacting customers on X isn’t something customer service teams have become less keen to do.
read:
> The latter change perhaps hints that maybe contacting customers on X is something customer service teams have become less keen to do.
Maybe. After suffering several mental stack overflows trying to parse all the mandatory and optional negations in the sentence, I resorted to reason and decided that if I worked on a customer service team, the last thing I'd want to contact customers through would be what's left of Twitter.
I don't understand this, 200 seats is a truly large call center, I can't imagine that there are that many that exist. So why are they intentionally reducing their user base ?
We use Avaya but thank God we do not use the cloudy version as we are nowhere near 200 seats..
Avaya have an excellent Call Center system but if that's the way things are going to go we will have serious problems. There are very few good solutions available, Avaya and Genesys basically own the market.
I wonder if this is a very poorly thoughtout application of the 80:20 rule (80% of profits from 20% of customers) given they have over 20,000 customers [ https://www.thomsondata.com/customer-base/avaya-customers-list.php ]
I know back in the 1990s, we applied the rule as: you incur 80% of your costs on 20% of your customers. Hence why many stopped their free services.
"I don't understand this, 200 seats is a truly large call center"
Not even close.
The one I did the Avaya IT for had 2000 contact centre +1500 regular staff, and that's classed as a medium size on the world stage
There are ones with several thousand staff, as an example, do you think when you phone your insurance broker the staff work for them?
This could be as simple as a reseller consolidation, and removing direct customers with small amounts of end users - both of which are understandable. The wording is very unclear though.
It's perfectly understandable if resellers need to have a minimum of 200 seats across all their customers, the cost of dealing with lots of tiny companies is much higher than a smaller number with more end users
It may have changed since I last used Avaya several years ago now, but their user database is as insecure as leaving your door wide open. They don't encrypt the database so the user passwords are stored in plan text. Sign in as admin, change the password field in whatever browser you're in to text and you reveal that persons password. Why is this an issue? Because as I'd talk to users, some would confess of using the same password as their Windows login. Anyone that gets into the database would have fun with that.
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