Out of its CX18 conference taking place this week in Nashville, Tenn., contact center provider Genesys introduced its latest routing engine, Predictive Routing, part of a summer release comprising hundreds of feature enhancements for PureCloud, PureConnect, and PureEngage.
While Genesys has long been known for its intent- and skills-based routing solutions, Predictive Routing marks the company's foray into machine learning (ML)-powered routing, as Christopher Connolly, VP of product marketing, Genesys, told me in a briefing. And it's not just for voice routing, he added. "Predictive Routing is one of the first and few ML-driven routing engines for all channels."
Predictive Routing uses historical and real-time data, along with artificial intelligence, to identify factors that influence customer-to-business interactions. These are things like favored communication channel, past product purchases and service requests, and recent transaction activity. The routing engine combines this information with agent profiles and factors like agent skills, interaction history, and business outcome data, to then predict ideal customer-agent matches. Since the solution is ML-based, the data models are continuously improved, Connolly said.
Early access customers have seen benefits like increased customer satisfaction, higher employee efficiency, decreased costs, reduced handle times, and improved first contact resolution, Genesys said. One customer, Canadian communications and media company Rogers Communications, shared its story on stage at CX18, noting a reduction of average handle time by 7% and increased retention of almost 3%. "We see great potential in using the Genesys solution to deliver smarter and faster service that respects out customers' time, sets our employees up for success, and produces stellar outcomes for our business," Kevin Jolliffe, VP of enterprise planning for Rogers, said in a prepared statement.
As contact center analyst Sheila McGee-Smith of McGee-Smith Analytics, pointed out in an email exchange, Genesys has been talking about Predictive Routing for more than two years. "Having a customer ... willing to take the stage at CX18 to talk about their experience with Predictive Routing is a big step forward -- from talking about it to delivering real business outcomes," she said.
"That said," McGee-Smith added, "[Jolliffe's] comment ... about the 'great potential' they see for Predictive Routing seems to imply there is still a lot to learn about how they will use it going forward."
The Big Picture
Predictive Routing might seem like a natural landing place for the technology Genesys gained in its February acquisition of cloud-based customer journey analytics provider Altocloud, and it is, but not quite yet. Genesys intends to enhance Predictive Routing with Altocloud technology, which will bring in valuable Web data, Connolly said. "By the end of the year, we'll see early prototypes of use cases with Altocloud, most likely starting with sales and marketing," he said.
Predictive Routing is available now for PureEngage for all channels (voice, text, Web chat, and social), and Genesys plans to roll it out to PureConnect and PureCloud later this year.
As mentioned, Predictive Routing is part of a summer release comprising hundreds of feature enhancements for PureCloud, PureConnect, and PureEngage. This is a new bi-annual release strategy from Genesys.
In addition to Predictive Routing, the release includes enhancements such as: Genesys Hub houses new Genesys API integration for asynchronous messaging apps; SMS aggregation for outbound SMS eliminates the need for third-party aggregators; Dialog Engine enables human agents and AI to work together via natural language processing capabilities; and Workforce Management Forecasting leverages AI to predict long-term contact center staffing needs.
Taken together, Predictive Routing and several other AI-infused capabilities demonstrate the company's commitment to carry its "Blended AI" strategy forward (see related No Jitter post, "Genesys Differentiates with Blended AI Approach"). With this strategy, the company is working to combine bots/AI with humans to enhance customer problem solving. Ultimately, it's the combination of its virtual assistant Kate -- described as "the personification of Genesys AI" -- ML, and real-time analytics that Genesys is betting on to deliver personalized, proactive, and predictive experiences for all.
