The most successful channel firms will address customer and employee experience challenges through a capability and consultancy powered approach, according to Ali Hastings, Senior Director and Regional Channel Leader, Avaya UK&I.
Working alongside clients to overcome their customer and employee experience challenges makes the difference between achieving business growth or losing out, believes Hastings. “You can’t survive today if you’re just a reseller of technology, you have to upscale and become more capable,” she stated. “Our partners are becoming SIs or MSPs. They’re transforming to provide thought leadership and consultancy services or building out their own services organisations so they can bring best-in-breed technologies together under one solution.”
Hastings noted that many partners are still selling UC lines and maintenance contracts, and that they might be OK for now, but that market is being commoditised. “The real opportunity is in helping companies, and large enterprises specifically, evolve while still protecting their existing investments – helping them innovate with platforms that provide all the features they need to reach their business goals,” she added. “It’s about investing in the CX and AI space to provide differentiation and innovation in an overall solution that brings value to customers both internally and externally – that’s what’s driving growth for the channel.”
Capability building
MSP capabilities are essential for building and delivering services that provide better outcomes for customers, and Avaya is working more closely with partners that understand the value that can be jointly delivered to customers. “These partners are winning and getting ahead of the curve,” added Hastings. “Being a traditional reseller that just sells technology boxes is a barrier to positive evolution. We’re in a new world now.”
It’s not about reselling tech. It’s about investing in the CX and AI space
To support the development of its top CX partners Avaya is building out bespoke customer experience lab environments in the UK, giving partners access to the Avaya Experience Platform and enabling them to integrate their own solutions, APIs or other integrations. “Partners can build specific use cases,” said Hastings. “It’s more powerful to partners than spinning up a website and running a demo on a laptop.”
According to Hastings there are three main action points for resellers wanting to build their capabilities: Understanding the customers’ needs, investing in domain expertise and investing in the platforms that truly deliver value. “In this way partners will be well positioned to help customers move their transformation journey forward, and will become trusted solutions advisors,” she added. “It’s a different world and as we move away from the typical resale model our partners are having to become experts and consultants. It’s not about reselling technology now.”
Hastings also pointed out that Avaya’s strategy is guided by a holistic approach to the challenges of meeting or exceeding customer expectations, and attracting and keeping the best talent. This holistic imperative displayed by Avaya includes positive momentum in other key areas of importance for the channel, notably around Net Zero initiatives. “Many contracts and RFPs have sustainability requirements attached to them,” she added. “We have set near-term company-wide emissions reduction targets in line with climate science, and our targets have been validated by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) which classified Avaya’s Scope 1 and 2 target ambition as in line with a 1.5°C trajectory.”
As of FY2023, Avaya reduced its Scope 1 and 2 (market-based) emissions by 33 per cent and its Scope 3 Economic Intensity by 50 per cent from a baseline year of FY2020. “We continue to identify opportunities to use energy more efficiently, and going forward, we plan to work with our supply chain to further lower emissions,” added Hastings.