Avaya online forum helps businesses grow revenues

Avaya Inc, a leading provider of communications networks and services for businesses, today announced the launch of a new online forum to help organisations develop strategies for growing revenues in a rapidly changing global environment. Entitled "Reach > Greater Revenue", this is the third in a series of Avaya online forums designed to help businesses use communications to reduce costs, increase security and grow revenues.

The new forum, now available online at www.businessrealities.com/press3, features insights and perspectives from Avaya executives and industry analyst Nick Lippis, as well as industry research from InformationWeek magazine and customer case studies from leading global organisations. A related live Web chat will be held at 11am Eastern on Thursday, 16 October, allowing participants to ask questions and to benefit from the recommendations of Avaya business leaders and other industry experts.

Reach > Greater Revenue is designed to help companies develop multipronged strategies for achieving a superior competitive advantage, even in a lacklustre economy. In particular the forum explores how businesses can utilise Avaya`s contact centre solutions and related applications, systems and services to enhance customer relationships and increase order size.

"To grow revenue, companies need to look no further than their communications system," said Nick Lippis, president of Lippis Consulting. "It can help them make significant improvements in customer service and response times - resulting in increased revenue per customer, customer loyalty and market-share gains."

In a recent survey of IT professionals, 40% said that generating revenues was the primary focus of their business technology strategy - a 60% increase over 2002. InformationWeek also found that improving customer service was the number one business goal of IT professionals for the last three quarters in a row.

During the forum, several Avaya customers will share how they are using communications to grow revenue - including Grant Thornton, a global accounting firm; Chunghwa Telecom, the largest telecommunications company in Taiwan; and Dollar Rent A Car, a major provider of rental vehicles.

Another is Hugendubel, the second largest bookstore chain in Germany with more than 1 000 employees and 27 branch retail outlets. The firm turned to Avaya for a customer service solution that would position Hugendubel for competition with new online retailers. Avaya helped Hugendubel integrate disparate financial accounts, courier services and stores into a single, integrated customer relationship management (CRM) system. With the new centralised system, the company`s customer service agents now can handle telephone calls, e-mails, online orders and Web chats through the same, intuitive interface, and incoming and outgoing order processing is fully automated.

"This was about completely rethinking the issue of customer contact from the ground up," said Stephan Gallenkamp, managing director of Hugendubel. "The end result is that our business runs more efficiently and our employees can now devote more of their time to their core skill - dealing with our customers."

To complement this online forum, Avaya is sponsoring a 19-city best practices forum on reaching greater revenues in the US. To find the city nearest you, please visit www.avayaseminars.com.