Avaya's GSD center in India along with its centers in the US and Europe serve customers across global geographies through the follow-the-sun model. Through this process the company has also been able to ensure that there is work-life balance for employees, and to be able to alternatively leverage centers around the globe.

An interesting fact to note is that though we are only a two-year old organization, the India center makes a substantial contribution to the Global backbone operations which is the highest level of support within Avaya GSD.

Typically, when companies start a new center, the approach is to replicate existing operations or business models as is, with a focus to achieve the same level of productivity, quality, etc as existing centers. When Avaya started its center in India, it modeled it on future needs of customers and the future state of Avaya's support operations. Being a new center, the company has taken a different route, and ramped up rapidly to build and implement its Global Service model at the same time. "The speed of ramp up and quality delivery is also attributed to factors like strong and large talent pool of software engineers in India," Shroff adds.

Avaya's customers run their businesses on Avaya technology, and depend on Avaya for providing high uptime for the communications infrastructure and quick turnaround of solutions.

The company has focused on building capability to meet and exceed these expectations. In the enterprise product support business, it is important to build strong service orientation and win customer confidence. Since customers are from different parts of the world, understanding the customer's context and culture can be a challenge. Avaya focuses not only on training its staff to provide effective technical support but also sensitize them on business impact. This ensures that Avaya builds customer management capability, communication skills, and not just language skills. Being able to relate to the criticality of the situation, responding to needs and taking them up on priority, goes a long way in ensuring customer satisfaction.

The company applies the Six Sigma methodology in its improvement initiatives when serving its customers, through analysis of customer feedback, making process changes, and refining Avaya's support model.

Bottlenecks
The focus of the top management is on equipping its employees with global orientation, service orientation, professionalism, and process orientation to exceed global standards and expectations. Here, in India, there is no dearth of good technical talent and passion to excel, but the environment and education does not foster strong service orientation and business acumen. One of the biggest challenges is to convert the strong potential of engineers within a very short period of time, requiring large investments in training. This increases the time taken to groom a new engineer to the point where he can handle complex issues, analyze critical customer situations, and provide rapid solutions.

Avaya's products are designed for a broad set of customers. The company takes into account the requirements of customers across various geographies and verticals. They are not designed for specific countries or verticals but can be customized to meet the needs of a specific customer. Considering that India is one of its largest markets and technology adoption in India is getting to be at par with the rest of the world, Avaya India pays a great deal of attention to the requirements of Indian customers and the emerging trends in the Indian market.

Its customers are always looking for technology and products that give them an edge over their competitors by improving their customer responsiveness, streamlining their operations, etc.

The company is working with industry bodies to address and sort out regulatory issues, which are considered the biggest bottlenecks that Avaya faces today. The other challenge is to educate customers about benefits of IP telephony which is today considered cost effective. The company needs to engage the customers and tell them of the larger benefits of technology.

Baburajan K
(with inputs from Nilabh Jha)
baburajank@cybermedia.co.in

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