Avaya, a Basking Ridge, N.J.–based contact center solutions provider, has been taking steps to beef up the professional services end of its business amidst today’s economic situation driving many companies to not just add new technology, but seek guidance on how to best utilize what they already possess. I had the chance speak with Chris Formant, the president of Avaya Global Services, and get his take on how he has been helping to transform the outlet since taking over the position nine months ago. Formerly a consultant at Bearing Point (which recently filed for bankruptcy protection) and in 2006 named one of the top 25 consultants in Consulting magazine, he brings myriad experience to the position.

What drove you to come to Avaya?

A couple of things drove me to come aboard nine months ago. One, in my heart of hearts, I believe one of the most exciting areas for years to come in technology will be the convergence of voice, video, and data — and I wanted to be in that space. Avaya was a way in for me. It is a terrific company with great people , and it’s worked out to be exactly as I figured.

What has been the hardest part of your job so far?

With any spin-off of AT&T, you don’t have to go far down too many layers before you hit the AT&T heritage. We have a large-scale restructuring and repositioning of the company that we’ve been undertaking, so the hardest part was designing a set of tactics and strategies the organization could line up behind. At the end of the day, we’re trying to do something that is most difficult in business to do: Improve financial performance significantly and, at the same time, strive to improve service quality, customer experience, and satisfaction. You can always get retention, satisfaction, and quality up by over-investing, but performing in the short term by slashing costs is a rarity. We set about improving customer satisfaction methodically, and that remains our approach.

What changes have you made to Avaya Global Services since taking it over?

The first thing we did — it sounds simple — was to set a future vision so everyone understood where we wanted to be in three to four years. That wasn’t clearly understood before. This includes what we’d look like, what customer satisfaction levels should be, how much of our support would be self-service, and what we’d look like from a professional services standpoint. We wanted to detail that vision out as specifically as we could. We were able to reduce it down to financial and operational principles so we could track ourselves against that, and the organization has responded.

We had to make some substantial changes organizationally, and fill some talent gaps so we brought in new talent from outside the company. That was in addition to moving people into better roles and reorganizing things. It’s worked well for us.

How so?

We made some giant strides in customer satisfaction and experience. We were recently award with J.D. Power certification [under the J.D. Power and Associates Certified Technology Service and Support (CTSS) Program]. We’re the fourth technology company to get this certification, and it’s the highest award we can get. They looked at core service and support, assisted service, self-service, Web, and field support.

What have you been hearing from your clients since the economic downturn?

They’re hurting. Maybe not in every country and industry — clearly there are some bright spots out there — but for the most part North American companies are really hurting. They want whatever we can do to help. The only reasons someone would buy new technology from us now is if it improves performance or reduces cost. That’s the business we’re in, and so we see a lot of our clients asking us to come in and look at their entire communications stack to determine how to better utilize what they’re doing.

What is the most important decision you made in the past nine months?

The personnel decisions, and how I engage the hearts and minds of my services team. How do I bring in new people that can help lead us to the next level? How do I reengage some who had been here and lost some of their energy? How do I make the dramatic change that we have, in fact, made without losing the hearts and minds of all the people? I didn’t want to disparage the past. I wanted to honor it but then create a new culture going forward. That was the highest risk to pull off, but we’ve been able to do it so far.

What is the most important decision you’ll have to make in the next year?

What do I cut and what do I sustain? In retrospect, it’s easy to say you want to size your organization for the marketplace and then go from there, but you tell me what the size should be. I think the most difficult decision will be balancing those current decisions of expediency and short-term performance versus long-term imperatives of where we want to be in the future. We’re a private company, so we have more latitude because we don’t have the investment community and stock price looming at us every day.

So it’s about balancing what I do today with what we want to ultimately achieve in the market. For example, there is extreme pressure to reduce cost but I can’t take my new technology investments down too much because I inherited an organization that had been delinquent in making some of the investments we needed to increase our remotability in self-service. That balancing act is the single biggest issue I deal with every day, including today.