AVAYA IS A TRAILBLAZER
Avaya embeds intelligent insights into CRM workflows using CRM Analytics Plus.
CRM, visual analytics, and AI combine to enable enhanced forecasting for account teams and execs.
Empowering sales and services teams with advanced analytics
Avaya is a leading pure-play unified communications & collaboration and contact center software company with around 100,000 global customers, serving more than 90% of the largest US companies. Its sales and services teams rely on state-of-the-art CRM technology for account management, sales operations, compensation planning, and other critical business activities.
The Avaya sales organization relies on vast amounts of CRM data to manage and optimize its relationships within each account, and the more quickly and intelligently this data can be analyzed, the better positioned sellers are to capitalize on opportunities. For years, wrangling this data to produce meaningful forecasting was a time-intensive process, yielding multiple reports in various locations that account teams would then have to manually aggregate and interpret--and even after they did so, it wasn't often clear what immediate actions the seller should take.
Using CRM Analytics Plus, which combines descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics, Avaya simplified and accelerated its reporting processes, reducing more than 12,000 global reports to a mere 15 dashboards, and made self-serve analytics available to all users. Today, the Salesforce-native visual analytics of CRM Analytics and the predictive capabilities of CRM Analytics’ Einstein Discovery help Avaya sellers forecast their sales predictions more effectively and spot new ways to grow their business within each account.
Visualizing past performance, real-time decisions, and an intelligent view of the future.
When visual analytics within Avaya's CRM platform replaced the burden and limitations of manual reporting, all areas of sales and sales operations saw an immediate effect. Communicating sales volumes to executive management became more streamlined and interactive, and sellers had a clearer picture into current account activities so they could more easily prioritize their daily and weekly work.
Even more significantly, CRM Analytics Plus helped them take forecasting to a new level. Using Einstein Discovery, Avaya now applies statistical methods and machine learning algorithms to the internal and external data stores, putting insights at the sellers' fingertips that help inform and predict future sales. They no longer need to manually piece together multiple reports, aggregate disparate data, validate inputs, and adjust for specific scenarios—the CRM delivers AI-driven predictions and recommended actions to them in real time.
Examples include customized CRM Analytics Plus models for prioritizing deals by predicting "propensity to close in quarter" and calculating "time series" intervals to avoid time wasted on blind bookings with no opportunity attached. With these enhancements, sales teams and their management spend far less time assembling the forecasts, and more time pursuing the opportunities that are likely to yield the best results.
Arming sales, operations, and leadership with insights—when and where they do their work.
Effective analytics requires the capability to not only generate new insights, but also make the insights accessible to the people who need them, and doing so at the right place and time. Avaya's vision for empowering its sales teams depended on putting insights directly in view of CRM users as they performed their day-to-day work, such as viewing account information or entering the data for a new opportunity.
Without needing to learn or consult alternate tools, sellers and teams using the CRM are now presented with various insights that are relevant to the account they're viewing or the action they take. Examples of insights might include account health checks, opportunity scoring, and propensity to buy.
"Tableau CRM Plus lets us link the analytics to our business processes by embedding these insights right within the CRM workflow," said Mariano Salatino, Vice President of Sales Operations at Avaya. "No other tool could give us that ability without a huge investment in custom development." As for Einstein Discovery, he adds: "We've proven that higher adoption of Einstein translates to a higher probability of hitting or exceeding sales quotas."
Centralized experience and simplified management, enabled by granular permissions.
The Avaya CRM Analytics Plus solution embeds advanced analytics right into the CRM experience for users, giving them dashboards to interact with instead of juggling disparate apps and reports. At the same time, the platform enables a high level of precision for personalizing each user's view. And because CRM Analytics Plus is native to Salesforce, the personalized insights reach every CRM user without requiring any changes to infrastructure, security, or permissions.
Over time, this approach makes it very easy for the IT and sales operations teams to add continuous value. "We can easily make changes across everyone's experience of the CRM as our business evolves and transforms," said Salatino. "All we have to do is change a single dashboard, and thousands of employees get the benefit of updated capabilities. It's managed within one template, rather than across thousands of reports."
Intelligence for all, not just the few.
Self-service, embedded advanced analytics has led to another important achievement at Avaya: data democratization. Where before a small team of analysts used the data to send reports to sellers and executives, now all roles, technical and non-technical, have the freedom to analyze and explore the data themselves—all on a trusted platform with rigorous role-based governance. Salatino points out that usage of the CRM Analytics solution increased 500% in the first year, then doubled again in the year after that.
"It's been a real paradigm shift for us," said Salatino. "We've moved from 'intelligence for the few' to 'intelligence for all' as a result of this transformation. The data and the self-service analytics are available to everyone, if they have permissions. So, rather than relying on analysts and reports, everyone can do the forecasting themselves."
“Tableau CRM Plus lets us link the analytics to our business processes by embedding these insights right within the CRM workflow," said Mariano Salatino, Vice President of Sales Operations at Avaya. "No other tool could give us that ability without a huge investment in custom development.”
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