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Creating Better Experiences: Genesys Partners on VoC

Genesys_AdobeStock_268787064_7621.jpeg

Someone tapping a tablet to rate a customer experience
Image: ipopba - stock.adobe.com
Over the last several years, contact center provider Genesys’s goal has been to provide customers with remarkable experiences, being empathetic throughout the whole customer journey. To further this goal, Genesys last month announced a partnership with a voice-of-the-customer software provider Qualtrics.
 
For some perspective, Gartner defines voice of the customer (VoC) as a software application that integrates feedback collection, analysis, distribution, and action into a single, interconnected platform to help you understand and improve the customer experience (CX). For an application to be VoC, Gartner stated it must contain three key components: collection channels, data, and insight.
 
Collection channels are the means to gather data, which include emails, websites, paper, text messaging, voice, mobile applications, etc. Then, the data itself can come in the form of direct feedback like forms, surveys, or focus groups; indirect from review sites, social channels, and customer interactions; or inferred with website’s clickstream data, commerce purchase history, mobile app location data, or contact center operational data. The last component takes customer feedback and turns it into actionable insight, accessible via dashboards, alerts, customer journey maps, workflow for service recovery, and capabilities to predict and prescribe relevant actions.
 
Looking at how Qualtrics accomplishes this, below we examine some of the features for its platform:
  • Ambient data across any channel — Qualtrics enables organizations to gather direct, indirect, and ambient experience data across any channel, such as SMS, web, mobile, in-app intercepts, social listening, and clickstream data. The Qualtrics platform has over 130 listening channels, which can create a complete CX picture for an organization.
  • Predictive analytics and intelligence — The Qualtrics iQ engine platform conducts advanced analysis from structured and unstructured data to automatically surface insights. Organizations can also conduct ad hoc analysis directly with Qualtrics, making it easy to share insights with the right stakeholders to take action.
  • Automated action and workflows — With a no-code orchestration engine, Qualtrics can automate any task within the Qualtrics XM Platform or within an organization’s existing operational systems. Qualtrics promotes 100 out-of-the-box integrations with most operational systems, allowing organizations to engage people and access everyday tools from within a single system.
Experiences Matter Now More Than Ever
By 2020, CX would exceed price and product as the main drivers for doing business with any company or organization, a Walker study predicted over eight years ago. This prediction has definitely come true and is the focus that most organizations desire to deliver on — a better CX in a highly competitive marketplace. As a contact center leader in the space, Genesys is looking to gain even more ground in the market.
 
COVID-19 accelerated cloud adoption in general and accelerated cloud adoption in the contact center specifically by at least two or three years. At the start of the pandemic, companies like Genesys were able to spin up a contact center in as little as 72 hours, helping organizations deliver on CX in the light of an international crisis and bringing customers and agents together. In nearly all cases, agents needed to work from home, and contact center agent tools were necessary and available to do just that.
 
In this past year, customers and consumers alike have now preferred digital as the way to connect with automated and self-service tools. Genesys’s and Qualtrics’s intent is to bring data points and insights of the customer service experience history, including sentiment over time, past service interactions, and communications preferences.
 
Both Genesys and Qualtrics are recognized leaders in their respective Gartner Magic Quadrant reports, CCaaS and VoC. The two platforms combined should make for a very interesting and dynamic delivery to existing Genesys customers and new customers alike. Genesys provides a Qualtrics integration via its partner App Foundry.
 
As experiences continue to grow faster than goods and services as a proportion of the economy, the organizations that rise to the top are differentiating themselves based on the experiences they create and deliver, Qualtrics argued. I agree, and it is those organizations that fully embrace experience in the contact center above all else that will facilitate those leaders in their respective vertical markets.
 
It is also critical to get customer feedback and leverage data associated with such in order to keep existing customers and gain new customers, as discussed in this Inc. article. Here are some statistics on what happens when the reverse happens, as shared in the Inc. article:
  • An unhappy customer has a 91% chance of never doing business with a company again, Lee Resources said.
  • A majority of consumers (86%) will quit doing business with a company due to a negative experience, Customer Experience Impact Report said.
  • Dissatisfied customers spread the word, telling anywhere from nine to 20 other people, White House Office of Consumer Affairs said.
Genesys: Focusing on Empathy, Experiences
Every organization understanding the criticality of customer experience will leverage a tool like Qualtrics to identify issues based on feedback and improve on such. Retaining a customer is vital to any organization's growth and can be measured in terms of annual revenue per customer. The ROI leveraging a tool such a Qualtrics can be significant, especially when winning back a customer who provided negative feedback earlier.
 
Genesys’s message in the last two years has been about experience as a service, empathy of the customer, and VoC. From my perspective, these themes align perfectly with Qualtrics engine and this new partnership between the two companies.
 
The announcement between Genesys and Qualtrics is very exciting, and it enhances Genesys’s strategy of experience and empathy with the customer. It will be interesting to see the adoption of Qualtrics as a partner with Genesys, as the market continues to evolve by leveraging experience as a service and empathy with the customer. I look forward to seeing how this partnership evolves over the coming months.