It’s earnings time. We’ve been following publically-traded companies for whom cloud call center is a significant component of their business. Many released financial results in the past couple weeks, so let’s see what can be discerned about the near term future of the sector. This isn’t an exhaustive review, of course. To keep the blog post digestible, we are just focussing on companies with interesting news. This quarter that’s Avaya, Five9, RingCentral and Twilio.
Tag Archives: five9
Something new this week! As a result of recent acquisitions and other maneuvers, we now have a nice sample size of publicly listed companies for whom cloud call center is a key focus. Many of them released their Q4 earnings in the past couple weeks. It’s interesting to review the numbers at a high level to see what kind of picture they paint for the near term future of the sector. Short answer: Pretty positive.
Let’s take a quick look at what was reported by Avaya, Five9, NICE, RingCentral, Twilio and 8×8.
10 months ago, Avaya filed for chapter 11 protection kicking off the largest bankruptcy event in the history of the call center industry. Avaya faced a tough challenge to reach a restructuring agreement with their many debt holders, and to have it done quickly in order to minimize the damage to the brand, and the slow bleed of customers to competitors. Most of the process happened out of the public view, but in the last month, three announcements have revealed the status.
It looks like Avaya met their challenge successfully and will be exiting bankruptcy soon. More importantly, they managed to shake off a large portion of their debt, and set their sights on an IPO in early 2018.
We’re now 6 months into the largest bankruptcy event in the history of the call center industry.
Avaya filed for Chapter 11 protection in January. The negotiations among the many stakeholders have happened behind closed doors so it’s hard to assess where we are along the timeline.
Only one significant event has been visible to the public so far: In March, Avaya agreed to sell its networking business to Extreme Networks for $100 million. That move was received positively by analysts and commentators.
But the big question remains: Are we a month away from a resolution? A year? No one knows. As the bankruptcy continues, the patience of partners, analysts and customers wears down. Each day is also another opportunity for competitors to pick away at Avaya’s customers.
Is your call center feeling sluggish or slipping on important metrics? For instance, the global metric for call wrap-up time is six minutes. Do you find things are just taking longer than expected? Or not getting done at all? It’s possible that there are pesky time wasters living in the call center, quietly dragging operations down. These issues usually don’t happen overnight, they exist for months, if not years without making a sound, and suddenly things are moving at a snail’s pace. So, what’s plaguing your call center’s productivity and what can be done to eliminate them? We explore common trends that limit efficiency and their corresponding resolutions…
