Originally known for its on-premises business phone system, Avaya has evolved into a cloud contact center solution that helps businesses manage their customer interactions across multiple channels, including voice, email, chat, and social media.
However, its rigid pricing and complex setup often push users to seek more flexible and reliable Avaya alternatives like Nextiva.
In this article, we’ll discuss Avaya’s features, capabilities, and pricing packages and show you why Nextiva is a better option for your contact center.
Avaya Contact Center Explained
Avaya started as an onsite business phone system for enterprise organizations. Over time, it has evolved into a cloud-based contact center solution for omnichannel customer engagement.
However, its evolution has been riddled with challenges. Since 2017, the company has filed for bankruptcy twice and still struggles to balance its on-premises solutions with more modern cloud contact center services.
Nevertheless, it has many features suited to enterprise-level organizations, including attribute resource selection, self-service automation, and Bring Your Own Channel.
Avaya components
Avaya offers a wide range of contact center products designed to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes and in all industries. Its most popular UCaaS products include:
- Avaya Aura Contact Center: A modern contact center solution that provides multimedia routing, workforce optimization, and outbound self-service for mid-sized enterprises.
- Avaya Enterprise Cloud: Running on Microsoft Azure, Avaya Enterprise gives you the best of two worlds: an on-premises contact center that’s fully integrated with the cloud. This integration allows customers to leverage the power of Azure’s cloud infrastructure to deploy and manage their communication and collaboration solutions.
- Avaya Contact Center Select: Avaya Contact Center Select is a real-time telephony platform. It integrates with Avaya IP Office, providing a wide range of call center features, including skill-based call routing and reporting and unified agent management.
Services and features
Here’s what users love the most about Avaya.
1. Omnichannel integration
Avaya Cloud Office application powers your entire business communication setup from a central platform. That way, you can make calls, host video meetings, and chat with your team in one application instead of switching between multiple channels — making your contact center more efficient.
2. Cloud integration
Avaya’s hybrid cloud experience allows businesses to take advantage of the benefits of both cloud and on-premise solutions. With Avaya’s hybrid cloud approach, businesses can leverage the scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness of cloud solutions while still maintaining control over their critical data and applications.
This approach allows businesses to choose the deployment model that best suits their needs, whether that’s a fully cloud-based solution, a fully on-premises solution, or something in between.
3. Integrations
Avaya is known for its extensive integration capabilities that enable businesses to seamlessly connect their contact center with a wide range of native applications and third-party platforms.
Businesses can create a highly customized and streamlined communication and collaboration environment that meets their specific needs and workflows. For example, you can connect the Avaya Experience Platform to your CRM software, allowing your agents to access updated customer information for personalized interactions.
4. Management and support
Avaya provides end-to-end contact center management and support, and Avaya Enterprise Cloud manages your contact center on-premises or as a dedicated cloud.
Avaya Managed Services provides continual updates and backend maintenance. There’s also a consulting arm that provides expert advice on optimizing customer journeys and communications strategies.
Avaya Contact Center Pricing
Avaya’s published pricing is based on a three-year contract for call centers with 200–399 users.
The actual pricing may be much higher for smaller businesses over a shorter term. You also need to contact sales for an exact pricing quote based on your preferred package.
That said, here’s a quick table showing what each Avaya pricing package offers:
| Best For | Top Features | Pricing (Per User/Month) | |
|---|---|---|---|
Digital (non-voice) | Small and medium-sized centers looking for comprehensive call center software | Unlimited email, web chat, and text messaging Bring Your Own Channel and chatbot AI-powered self-service automationIntelligent routing Conversational AI | $35 |
Voice (non-digital) | Organizations that are scaling their customer experience across multiple digital channels | Inbound voice Preview outbound dialing AI-powered self-service automationIntelligent routing Conversational AI Voice recording | $60 |
All media | Medium-scale and enterprise organizations that are scaling to omnichannel customer engagement | All digital capabilities All voice capabilities Blended media that simultaneously serves voice and digital inquiries Workforce engagement that drives employee performance and enhances compliance | $89 |
Avaya also offers a highly customizable package that lets you create a solution that meets your unique contact center needs. But, while this can be seen as a benefit for enterprise contact centers seeking tailored solutions, it adds complexity to the budget planning process for smaller organizations.
Why Nextiva Contact Center Is Better
Although Avaya offers decent features, its complex pricing and user experience often push organizations to switch to more reliable contact center platforms like Nextiva.
Nextiva provides a comprehensive range of call center and digital capabilities, making it a versatile solution for various contact center needs.
1. Transparent and flexible pricing
Unlike Avaya, where customers must contact sales to get an accurate quote, Nextiva’s pricing is right there on its website so you know what to expect from the get-go. This means you can purchase your contact center software and enjoy its ROI early instead of wasting time on lengthy sales conversations.
Nextiva also offers more flexible pricing options than Avaya. While Avaya mostly locks you into three-year contracts, Nextiva allows monthly or annual payments to suit different budgets.
For $129 per month, Nextiva gives you a contact center with outbound and inbound calling capabilities, real-time reporting, and workflow automation. And, you can upgrade anytime to access more contact center features as your organization scales.
2. Comprehensive features
Nextiva offers everything you need to run an efficient contact center at scale, including unlimited calling, video conferencing, and advanced call routing, as well as access to real-time analytics.
Let’s discuss each of these a bit more:
- Unlimited calling: Enjoy unlimited VoIP calls in Canada, the U.S., and Puerto Rico — which eliminates the need for landlines and reduces phone costs.
- Video conferencing: Nextiva has built-in video conferencing software that lets you host and join video meetings right in your VoIP phone system.
- Advanced call routing: Automatically queue and distribute incoming calls to the best-fit agent based on a predefined set of rules and criteria, such as an agent’s skill set. This improves agents’ efficiency, reducing call wait times and improving customer experience.
- Real-time analytics: Monitor your call center performance in real time using Nextiva’s robust analytics features. You can track call metrics, record and analyze calls for insights, and share data with your team using customized dashboards.
And those aren’t all. There are other benefits of signing up for Nextiva’s contact center as a service offering.
3. User-friendly
Something that stands out for our users is how easy it is to set up and start using Nextiva. You don’t need any special tech skills to implement our contact center solution — simply follow our implementation guidelines, and the software will be up and running in no time.
But don’t just take our word for it. Hear from one of our users:
While Avaya is easy to use, some customers struggle to implement certain capabilities like SIP trunking. Avaya’s platform can also get buggy, affecting your agents’ productivity.
4. Highly reliable
With eight points of presence and carrier-grade data centers, Nextiva offers a superior 99.999% network uptime, ensuring practically zero disruptions. You can also see its uptime status in real time to check if its performance has slowed for any reason.
Some Avaya users experience frequent downtime, leading to call disruptions. At their worst, calls are missed, dropped, or experience audio glitches or pops.
You Get It All With Nextiva
While Avaya offers decent contact center capabilities, its expensive pricing plans and complex implementation processes will likely hold you back.
Nextiva, on the other hand, offers an all-in-one contact center solution with comprehensive features, flexible price plans, and a great user experience. It’s the best choice for organizations looking to efficiently scale their contact center operations.
Click the “Get started” button below to check out our detailed breakdown of Nextiva’s contact center solutions to find a package that’s right for your business.
