Consolidating its many extranets and intranets, Avaya implemented Autonomy’s solution to launch a unified, global enterprise extranet capable of providing personalized views for employees and BusinessPartners by specific region and job function. Avaya salespeople and business partners can now use a simple customized sales view to quickly and easily obtain the content they need — from key product features to warranty details — without having to wade through hundreds of printed pages, as was formerly the case.
“Our objective for marketing asset management was to have one presence and many views,” said Rodgers. “All our channels are now receiving content in a timely manner, which supports a consistent time-to-market model and a unified customer experience.”
Making Avaya.com Truly International
The next phase of Avaya’s marketing asset management strategy was to leverage lessons learned from its extranet project and apply them to its company website, Avaya.com.
“We redesigned our external presence by taking a portrait of our internal corporate operations, then turning it into a market-driven website,” Rodgers said.
Of the 880 websites Avaya inherited from Lucent, many were customer-facing regional and country sites. Branding, content, and translation inconsistencies plagued Avaya from region to region. Publishing processes were not well-coordinated between regional and country sites. As a result, time-to-market suffered and in some regions there was insufficient content to support external audiences. As a first order of business, Avaya solved its branding issues by creating three regional sites and 25 separate country variants, each leveraging the same look-and-feel and primary content. Unlike its intranet, Avaya’s marketing team owns, operates, and governs its external web presence.
“Our brand and its presentation is Marketing’s priority,” said Rodgers. “We still have an extremely strong partnership with our IT teams, and we use the same standardized technology platforms, with Autonomy supporting us.”
A single, core repository for all worldwide content helps streamline the website translation process and provide a uniform source of information about Avaya’s 25,000 different products. A single global publishing process now supports all channels, with content contributors using the same content distribution system ensuring a consistent user experience worldwide.
“It’s essential for us to maintain content consistency and parity across our external and internal channels,” said Rodgers. “People can now learn basic facts about technology, do more in-depth research, take in an online briefing, and connect with Avaya anywhere in the world. We have a way to keep our organization aligned around the brand.”
FYI Portal Fuels Future Growth
“To measure ROI,” Rodgers explained, “we use customer satisfaction research for both our company and our online presence, and also measure brand awareness around the globe through online surveys. This is supplemented with customers’ opinions about our online content; measurements of the health of our site, and site traffic.”
Autonomy’s Marketing Asset Management solution has achieved meaningful results toward improving the quality of customer interactions at Avaya.com, having a direct impact on customer loyalty and the user experience. According to Rodgers, the solution has helped drive a 20 percent increase in global unique visitors to Avaya.com, while increased content satisfaction grew from 59 percent to 79 percent. In addition, Avaya has reduced content time-to-market by 75 percent across its internal and external channels. Now the company can launch worldwide marketing campaigns simultaneously in all countries. For product launches, Avaya is able to deliver a wealth of product-related content, globally, at the time of launch, irrespective of customer, partner, or employee location. Most significant in terms of hard costs, Avaya has achieved operational excellence by reducing internal publishing costs by 90 percent, and external publishing costs by 75 percent. Looking ahead, Rodgers feels Avaya has made great strides toward realizing marketing asset management from a marketing perspective, but there is still more work to do.
“We’re starting to work on end-to-end support, and other applications that our customers interact with on a regular basis,” said Rodgers. “It’s time to go beyond marketing and start to integrate across those applications and we believe that Autonomy can help us achieve these goals.”