One of the Holy Grails in customer care since the explosion of the internet, and subsequently e-tailing, has been tying together information on what a customer has been doing on the Web with contact center activity. Three years ago, Genesys took a step in this direction when it announced Conversation Manager. With Proactive Engagement, announced this week at G-Force Americas in Boca Raton, the company takes a more targeted approach, delivering a solution to help companies maximize revenue from customer web activity.
Genesys Proactive Engagement is designed to match prospective customers with the best person at the precise moment when intervention can mean the difference between an abandoned shopping cart and a sale.
Proactive Engagement relies on some solution-specific Web services as well as a number of existing suite components. New elements include Web Monitoring Service, which tracks consumer web behavior, a Rules Engine that decides when and how to engage with a customer, and an Engagment Service to drive engagemnt offers. The diagram below shows how these elements work together to first monitor Web activity, then qualify based on customer history whether an offer should be made and finally engage with the prospect. The engagment can be done in real time, e.g., by sending a context-specific chat request message to the customer, or at a later date, e.g., an emailed coupon offer.
Unlike time-based chat pop-ups that can annoy more than engage customers, Genesys Proactive Engagement allows the use of an number of different variables during web monitoring to decide whether an offer to communicate should be made. Variables tracked include specific pages visited, the order in which pages are visited, the length of time on a page, and actions taken on a page (adding or removing an item from a shopping cart, clicking on a specific hyperlink, etc.). While Genesys has only just announced Proactive Engagement publicly, the company reports that there are already 17 customers in various stages of engagement as part of an Early Adopter program.
So why have I asserted that with Proactive Engagement Genesys takes on a new challenge? Because with this solution come a new set of competitors. From the ranks of the CRM companies, Oracle/RightNow attacks similar opportunties. eService companies such as eGain and Kana compete for similar types of projects. What Genesys is betting on is that customer care organizations will welcome the opportunity to solve the abandoned shopping cart conundrum with the same partner they use for other contact center channels. A trusted partner at that.
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