At the start of December, I was fortunate enough to attend a two-day virtual summit hosted by Genesys, alongside 50 select analysts and consultants and members from Genesys's senior management team. During the event, Genesys provided us with a glimpse of what's ahead and how it’s moving beyond personalization.
Some of the top takeaways and updates include:
- Strategic alliances — Genesys will be creating more strategic alliances, standardizing integrations, and will have more customers operating Genesys Engage on its new cloud platforms. Genesys’s message throughout the summit was that it’s easy to work with them on partnerships, adoption, onboarding agents, adding new capabilities, and more, which is reinforced by Genesys’s AppFoundry.
- A vertical focus — Genesys will now have a vertical focus on banking, insurance, health care, retail, and government and shared a plan to provide more specific industry offers in the future.
- One Genesys — Genesys's approach to the One Genesys solution will focus on operational excellence, design, sustainability, and growth that factors in diversity, equity, and inclusion.
- Accelerated cloud transformation — Genesys plans to capitalize on the market by providing tailor-made innovation, leveraging Azure and AWS, to create private solutions, migration tools, and APIs.
- Superior experience — Genesys will provide a superior experience to its installed base and intelligent work distribution, transformational experiences delivered by Genesys and partners, and hybrid acceleration via WEM and AI.
- Genesys experience — The Genesys experience will include innovation, simplified contracting, CX evolution, and their PureBridge strategy.
- Expansion — Genesys looks towards expanding its market, including a digital-first
Taking a look back, Genesys and the business functions it provides have evolved over its 30-year history, from (voice-only) call centers focused on efficiency in the 1990s to a future focused on loyalty and end-to-end experience optimization. Genesys used a demo and customer stories to illustrate how customers can use empathy, access to data, and support from their ecosystem, to move into the personalization phase, which is characterized by its partnerships with Microsoft and Adobe.
Genesys strategy moving forward is to accelerate its cloud transformation and leverage customer employee data, AI, and engagement, (as shared in the visual below), in a personal and empathic way.
Customers Share Success Stories
Day two focused on several customers who have had exceptional experiences moving to Genesys CCaaS. These stories were larger deployments — many of these customers were characterized by multi-thousand seats across multiple sites, some globally, which is unique to what we are seeing in the market among all CCaaS providers. A couple of the customer testimonials included:
- A company converted over 2,000 agents in 17 countries and was impressed with Genesys simplicity and adaptability moving to the Genesys cloud solution. This customer was able to beat their internal five-month timeframe for conversion leveraging the Genesys platform.
- Another customer leveraged Genesys’s cloud for their IT service desk and provided a proof of concept. This customer now provides an integrated experience and shared how they are more effective in their operation, especially for first contact resolution. The customer leverages Salesforce as the frontend, and it works seamlessly with Genesys in the background.
- One of the public references was Ethiopian Airlines. CIO Getinet Tadesse shared that he was considering hiring an additional 100 agents to better manage potential pandemic spikes. What they found, though, was that Genesys WEM was a way to manage resources. For them, Genesys’s Predictive Engagement was leveraged to improve operations without the requirement of hiring new agents, using AI to analyze visitors' behaviors on websites. Tadesse shared that it helps predict outcomes of visitors to the Ethiopian Airlines’ website and are looking to achieve and then personalize the visitor engagements to achieve those outcomes.
Two Genesys Executives Weigh In
I was also able to have one-on-one sessions with executives Olivier Jouvre, EVP & GM of Genesys Cloud, and ML Maco, EVP, Global Sales & Field Operations. Both one-on-ones offered additional insight into Genesys's future.
Jouvre’s shared his experience of running his own AI consulting firm and working on IBM's Watson product, and how that experience carried through and is boosting Genesys's AI acceleration. Olivier predicted that AI will be very pervasive in the next 24 months, and WEM will be getting AI everywhere.
While talking with ML, she shared that in her short six months with Genesys that she has made major headway focusing on verticals and strategic alliances, amongst other areas. She finds that partners and customers want to move to the cloud quickly and decisively and has been able to integrate her experiences into Genesys’s growth and vision. I asked ML for a takeaway comment from the summit, and she said “to garner the most important properties for customers, really investing in those customers and understanding their business and transformation faster. This is the time to be a good vendor partner and see these customers in multiple ways under the One Genesys umbrella and strategy. We’re in a good position to bring it forward.”
A Look Ahead
COVID-19 has accelerated the growth of cloud by at least 24-36 months, and Genesys is rising to the occasion. As cloud transformation takes place and new competitors enter the arena, Genesys is ready to protect their current base of premises-based customers with a variety of solutions, along with bringing new customers to their visionary cloud platform.
Customer experience (CX) is now front and center in 2020, being more important than price and product as the most important buying criteria, according to an earlier Walker study. Genesys’s guiding principle of “Experience as a Service” surely complements that. But it’s no longer just about a contact center delivering on multiple channels, but it's about a contact center that can deliver on the CX, patient experience, and even employee experience.
