Avaya hangs up on users with fewer than 200 SaaSy contact center seats

Customers told to pay up, quit, or wait for promised alternative ‘innovation’ coming real soon now

Avaya has advised customers and resellers of a planned “evolution” of its products that starts with a requirement to license at least 200 seats worth of its SaaS-y contact center wares by June 30, 2025.

A message to partners explains that the change is needed “To meet enterprise needs to innovate and orchestrate seamless customer journeys”.

The first evidence of Avaya meeting needs and orchestrating seamless customer journeys is the plan to require a “200-seat Monthly Minimum Agent Commit" for its Avaya Experience Platform (AXP) cloudy contact center. Users have a little relief from being able to mix those 200 seats between the Essentials Digital, Essentials Voice, and Advanced variants of AXP.

Those that don’t want to pay for 200 seats have been given a choice to either terminate their current subscriptions or shift to forthcoming “additional innovative cloud and on-premises solutions for seamless customer migration”.

We’ve asked Avaya for detail about those innovations, and when they’ll be revealed, as surely customers deserve to know about their options sooner rather than later – although vendors sometimes prefer to move slowly and force customers into fast decisions. If we receive a substantial reply, we’ll update this story.

Avaya’s letter also reveals new names for elements of the AXP packages, plans to depreciate a voice recording feature for AXP, and removal of X/Twitter messaging integrations. The latter change perhaps hints that maybe contacting customers on X isn’t something customer service teams have become less keen to do.

These changes follow the 2024 retirement of Avaya CEO Alan Masarek, who was hailed for having led “a successful, eight-quarter transformation of the business, setting Avaya’s ongoing strategic plan for innovation and growth, and firmly positioning the company as a leader in Enterprise CX.”

Patrick Dennis became Avaya CEO last September. According to CXToday, Dennis has since focused Avaya on its top 1,500 customers and overseen at least two rounds of redundancies. That’s a combination of tactics readers may find familiar if they’ve followed our coverage of Citrix and VMware.

Avaya has not had an easy time of it in the last decade, having used Chapter 11 bankruptcy protections in 2017 and then again in 2023.

A LinkedIn member who goes by “Phil G” and works for UK consultancy and Avaya partner Invosys opined that the 200-seat requirement is not going down well.

“The damage to customers trust is palpable. This isn’t just about numbers; it’s about relationships, loyalty, and the businesses that took a leap of faith with Avaya as their trusted partner,” he wrote.

“Instead of capitalising on the momentum created during Alan Masarek’s tenure, Avaya has been caught in a cycle of cuts, losing not just employees but also the invaluable experience they brought to the table,” he added.

He’s also not keen on the decision to focus on large customers, describing it as “a missed opportunity, especially in a time when business partners are losing confidence, and customers are left questioning their choices.”

Avaya customers are not short of choices. Plenty of vendors offer cloudy contact centers, and several are already circling and pointing out their products happily serve customers that need fewer than 200 seats. ®