Determining the best architecture for your CX platform

Innovation with respect to the customer experience remains crucial as global CX technology spending grows year-over-year, including increased spending on generative AI, the cloud, and digital services. Yet this acceleration can aggravate business management and create fundamental business risk, especially for established enterprises. Without the right cloud architecture, enterprises can be crushed under a mass of operational disruption that impedes their digital transformation.   

What’s getting in the way of transformation journeys for enterprises? How can they uplevel their infrastructure and platforms to deliver great experiences without disrupting what’s already in place? Enterprises must face these questions head-on if they are to take full advantage of today’s upswing in innovation to meet evolving customer needs, and it begins with determining the best CX Platform to fit your needs.

Enterprise innovation: Waiting for the turning point  

Transforming complex, bespoke systems within large enterprises is akin to climbing the highest peak of a challenging “J” curve: 

• At the outset, there’s significant investment in time, resources, and energy. The initial stages involve meticulous planning, analysis, and strategizing. 
• Then, leaders brace for resistance, setbacks, and unforeseen challenges. The sheer scale and complexity of existing systems can make the transformation journey feel daunting, like scaling a steep incline.  
• On top of this, the disruption caused by these changes and challenges can tire out those entrusted with leading the transformation.   

The expectation is the curve will begin to flatten and initial investments will start to yield results. Unfortunately, research shows otherwise. In 2019, 80% of enterprise executives said innovation was a top priority but only 30% said they were good at it. By 2023, 96% were prioritizing innovation to drive business growth but only 21% said they were succeeding. 

This juxtaposition indicates a clear misalignment between business strategy and performance and is informative in hellping enterprises choose their path to CX superiority. This isn’t a matter of demonstrating greater organizational resilience or patience. The issue is one of technology, and it can be overcome with the right architectural approach.   

Mindset Shift: Fuel innovation using what’s already in your “tank”   

In the words of Albert Einstein, “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.” If not planned out effectively, these words can apply to an enterprise’s innovation strategy, and notably, how an enterprise migrates to the cloud. 

The cloud is the way to innovate at scale and speed, but enterprises need to move tactfully to strike the optimal balance between control, security, and scalability. As they add advanced capabilities such as AI, automation and analytical tools, enterprises must consider the major investments they’ve already made in existing on-premises solutions – or at least those they have no reason to abandon. 

The goal is to adopt an infrastructure that is resilient, flexible and dynamic in terms of responding to changing business and customer needs without threatening stability or creating IT waste. Imagine not only being able to preserve existing systems but using them to lever digital transformation. 

That’s the power of Avaya’s approach to innovation, aptly named “Innovation Without Disruption.” Our industry-leading cloud platform, Avaya Experience Platform, enables organizations to leverage what seems unusable to become unstoppable. With Avaya’s platform, you can: 

• Leverage existing investments while strategically incorporating cloud technologies that enhance agility, innovation, and cost-efficiency. This can be achieved by layering advanced solutions onto existing systems, ensuring you never have to choose between cloud-based flexibility and on-premises stability.
• Determine which elements of your communication and collaboration infrastructure to deploy on-premises, in a private cloud, or through public cloud services. A hybrid cloud approach can be employed to retain systems that are performing well – avoiding the ‘rip and replace’ mentality, while laying a foundation for future innovation.
• Seamlessly scale to meet demand, be it spikes in user traffic or the integration of new tools that deliver autonomous customer journeys and digital services, all powered by AI.
• Employ an open, scalable platform that allows selection of best-in-class solutions from an array of ecosystem partners comprising technology leaders. 

The New Approach: Innovation Meets Tradition  

To ensure customer operations are operating at the highest level, enterprises must keep pace with unrelenting change and rapidly drive demonstrable results. This means having the freedom to choose the right mix of cloud services and deployment models – on premises, private or public cloud – and strategically integrating existing technology where it makes the most sense. This will help ensure innovation without disruption, enabling enterprises to optimize performance, security, and cost-efficiency – and checking off every box, from continuity and cost to data security and compliance. 

Above all, this approach aligns architectural design with desired customer experience outcomes, giving enterprises a consistent way to translate technology investments to measurable business value. 

Eighty-two percent of enterprise leaders believe a company will become extinct by 2030 if it fails to innovate. Learn more about how Avaya can help you innovate without disruption, future-proof your customer and employee experiences, and leverage CX solutions for long-term success.

To learn more, visit us here.