Fans of Avaya say the reliability and sophistication of its call-center products—vestiges of its roots as part of AT&T—make it the one to beat. “Avaya has been developing this stuff over several generations,” says Rick Marlowe, telecommunications coordinator at ESL Federal Credit Union in Rochester, N.Y.
UpSource, a provider of outsourced call-center services, installed an Avaya system in January 2003 after the Cisco Systems phone switch it was using with call-routing software from Interactive Intelligence failed at least once a month, says Michelle Steinmeyer, UpSource’s vice president of operations. (Cisco says Interactive Intelligence had not invested enough in product development to work properly with Cisco’s switch; Interactive Intelligence says it has 100 satisfied customers using Cisco’s switch.) By contrast, Steinmeyer says, the Avaya call-routing software on Definity switches hasn’t skipped a beat. “Everything just went so well with Avaya,” she says. “I sleep well now.”
One of Avaya’s biggest downsides, though, is that its call-center offerings are designed to work with an all-Avaya telephony infrastructure. “We chose Genesys because it lets us be vendor-independent,” says Scott Quartner, senior systems engineer at financial services firm T. Rowe Price.
The flip side of the argument is that one vendor’s products should, ideally, play together better. “We like that Avaya is a single hardware platform,” says Sherry Guzman, director of customer service at Medical Mutual of Ohio. The health insurance provider had been using an NEC phone switch and automatic call distributor; the two systems sometimes had problems communicating with each other, Guzman says.
Plus, customers say, adding new features to an all-Avaya network is relatively simple. In 2001, Canadian retailer Hudson’s Bay replaced its old call-routing setup—which couldn’t transfer calls among its centers in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver—with Avaya’s Best Service Routing. That software distributes calls based on agent skills (such as language) and other factors. “We’d already standardized on the Avaya phone switches,” says Valerie Mills, director of contact center services for Hudson’s Bay. “So integrating the skills-based routing software was definitely easier than if we’d used a third-party product.”
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Avaya Operating Results*
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* Fiscal year ends Sept. 30
Source: company reports
Other Financials**
Total assets $4.16B
Stockholders’ equity $794M
Cash and equivalents $1.62B
Long-term debt $294M
Shares outstanding 488M
Market value, 12/3 $7.31B
**As of Sept. 30, 2004, except as noted
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