More Layoffs At Avaya/ Expect Lowered Service levels

[orypecos]

http://www.cwa-comtech.org/uploads/AvayaSurplus110205.pdf

Avaya is laying off again. No, not useless Vice Presidents with Social Science Degrees instead of engineering degrees. Avaya is laying off the people that provide your needs.
In addition, Avaya and CWA are negotiating a new contract that runs up in May. So extect lowered service levels when needing assistance. That is because CWA members will be concentrating of how they are going to feed their families if they are locked out, and management will be gearing up to sit at the phones and go out to your location, both jobs they are woefully incompetant to perform.

 

[victor5908]

How low can they go?
I don't have experience with cisco or Nortel or whatever,but can they possibly be worse than Avaya?

 

[orypecos]

They laid off some of the Tier 3 engineers about 4 years ago, then hired some of them back, then laid them off again and shifted much of the Tier 3 support to India with many problems. This is causing moral to plumitt.
Most Lab enployees that didn't get a bonus last year have quit and staffing is thus further reduced and more products are coming out with many bugs in them. One Lab engineer estimated that for every Labs employee that leaves, over 5 employees are tied up fixing the problems on the Tier 2 & 3 level.
Avaya is too fearfull of the CWA union to fire the technicians that refuse to provide good service.

 

[NX01]

It seems to me that Avaya has stopped dev work on a lot of their older products. The move to s8000 servers and integrating everything seemed to be a step in technolgy but will this be Avaya's last big roll out? CM3? with anything after just being bug fixes and calling it CM4..CM5? When I read the specs on CM3 compared to CM1 or 2 I scratched my head...the sales people actually tried to sell me a 100k system based on the EC500 extend button! Wow makes sense now...

In the future everything will work...

 

[kkumpula]

I am sorry some of you feel the way you do. As a person "directly" affected by the CWA/Avaya contract I can only say that regardless of the outcome, I will continue to support the product as well as the EU's of it.

Do I think Avaya is fearful of the Union. Not anymore. Consider the legacy: ATT was at one time the company behind the now Avaya. The number of employees represented by the union is now considerbly lower than pre-divestiture. A "strike" no longer has the impact it once had. You will not lose your operator/information services if Avaya techs go out on strike like in the days of old.

As far as CM3 is concerned: I think the sales team missed a pretty important item that is now avaible in the realease. Instead of two servers paired for redundency, you can now have three. Perhaps Server Seperation is not an issue for you, but it was one of many new items I found in CM3.



The question may not be the technology, but the competency of the support people.

 

[orypecos]

As far as the percentage of persons at Avaya that are Union, that in some ways has gone up in the last 10 years due to the fact that messaging in Denver use to be supported only by salaried persons on the tier 2 level, and now they are all supported by union employees, as are CMS, CAS, IVR, and many other system. In addition, many of the Tier 3 people are being hired directly from the outside, so they have no tier 2 experience. It is good because these outside hires usually have a 4 year technical degree, which in the Technical SErvice Center is rare. But bad because they haven't had years of experience on telephone systems.
If Avaya is not fearfull of the Union, why don't they fire the lazy arrogant TSC technicians that abuse the customers so bad. I am not talking about all the technicians, but there are too too many of them.
I haven't much experience with Nortel, other than I tried to get some pamphlets on their systems one time, and the 800 number refered me to the local area people, who they didn't have the number. I got a couple of numbers out of the current phone book and internet. One I got was always busy, the other one was ring no answer, and the third I got a temporary employee that didn't know anything, and didn't want to find out. So I guess Avaya doesn't have a monopoly on incompentance.

 

[NX01]

kkumpula has drinken the Avaya Kool Aid in the lunch room. I forsee Avaya getting bought by Tyco or GE. Poor Lucent...maybe their stock will DO SOMETHING! I want to retire one day.

In the future everything will work...

 

[Inverness]

Let me chime in just a little. I know that Avaya is recruiting from the outside because I got a phone call from a recruiter. I will check into this Avaya opening. I am an Avaya customer working with a Definity Guestworks server and switch, and my background is in engineering (22 years)in RF and Microwave electronics, and over eight years in telecommunications and cable. What does any of the above have to do with anything, nothing I suppose, but if my background works for Avaya that will be just fine with me. With regards to unions, unions lost much clout since the Regan days, and just like pensions, are for a certainty going by the way side, and this is not entirely good. This is somewhat unfortunate because unions at one time did actually serve to protect employee's from the calousness of employers, but what are they now, I wonder.

 

[orypecos]

I hope they offer you a job, and you accept it. You are just what Avaya needs. Keep a low profile if you do. Many of the best have been fired or layed off for rolling their eyes in a meeting or supporting a fellow hard worker that wouldn't toe the corporate line.

 

[orypecos]

Avaya lays off 74 in state amid hot competition
By Beth Potter
Denver Post Staff Writer

Telecommunication company Avaya said Wednesday it would terminate 74 workers in Colorado to streamline its operations, a spokeswoman said.

The customer-service workers - 53 in Highlands Ranch and 21 in Westminster - can stay on for two months more under Avaya's exit policy, said Lynn Newman, a spokeswoman at the New Jersey-based company.

About 10 workers were also laid off at a Florida Avaya office Wednesday, she said.

"This will result in greater productivity and efficiency," Newman said. "We think customer service will be unchanged."

Avaya's business - making phone equipment and more recently providing long-distance Internet calling - is extremely competitive, said Bob Larribeau, a telephone-company analyst in San Francisco.

"It's a pretty tough sector," Larribeau said. "Avaya

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has been moving into VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), but a lot of other companies have moved into that as well, like Cisco Systems."

Avaya has about 2,000 people in customer service, technical support, product development, administration and sales in Colorado. It was spun off from Lucent Technologies, which was created under deregulation of AT&T.