Analyst Perspectives

During a recent analyst briefing, I learned that Genesys finished 2015 with a bang and enters 2016 with high expectations. Last year it made several changes at the top of the organization, naming a new president, Tom Eggemeier; a new chief marketing officer, Merijn te Booij; and a new head of global sales and field operations, Mark Turner. Their mandate is to stimulate sales of the company’s core product, Customer Experience Platform. I also learned that since spinning out of Alcatel Lucent in 2012, Genesys has had financial success, won many new accounts and expanded around the globe. Several new customers use the cloud-based version of the product, which reflects our analysis that many organizations are replacing outdated, disconnected on-premises systems with cloud-based, fully integrated software suites.

As I wrote in May 2015, components of the Genesys Customer Experience Platform support various aspects of customer experience management. There are three main components: Digital Engagement Center, Employee Engagement Management and Enterprise Workload Management. Digital Engagement Center is contact center infrastructure software that manages multiple channels of communication (voice, email, chat, the Web and social media), self-service in the form of IVR, advanced interaction routing and recording, and predictive, progressive and preview dialing. Employee Engagement Management is an extended version of workforce optimization that includes interaction recording, quality management, workforce management, agent coaching, skills management, customer surveys, and speech and text analytics. Enterprise Workload Management is unique to Genesys; it has capabilities to create tasks for contact center agents and back-office employees, as well as workflow management to route tasks to individuals and monitor completion of them.

Genesys also offers products that can be used alone or integrated with others. Omnichannel Desktop enables agents to access the information and systems they need to handle customer interactions and helps agents deliver the kind of experiences customers expect. It can be used with enterprise workload management to ensure that follow-up tasks are created as interactions are completed. A range of integration capabilities connect the platform to third-party applications such as CRM, so data can be retrieved and updated during and after interactions. Reporting and analytics tools visualize for users the performance of overall interaction handling, showing, for example, customer journeys, and predictive analytics helps users anticipate future customer behavior and plan to deal with it. During the briefing the people I spoke with reported that more of its customers deploy a combination of its products, a trend that it will support in 2016.

Our benchmark research into next-generation customer engagement shows that organizations struggle to support the number of systems required to handle multiple communication channels and customer-related data; chief among the issues are difficulty in integrating systems (cited by 49%) and communication channels managed as silos (47%). Further issues arise because employees across the organization handle interactions and don’t share a comprehensive view of customers (including journey maps); this leads to customers receiving inconsistent responses (a problem for 33%). Insights from several of our research reports lead me to conclude that no one system can deliver the highly sought omnichannel customer experience, and having unconnected systems complicates the situation. Companies need to manage varieties of channels, employees, tasks and transactional data systematically. To do this they need a comprehensive view of customers, interactions and the outcomes of interactions to supply all the other systems. The Genesys portfolio includes all these capabilities, and the systems are integrated so data can flow between systems. This enables organizations to connect previously unconnected processes; for example, they can us analytics to inform routing and use customer feedback as input to agent quality management. Offering the products through different supply models – on-premises, in the cloud and hybrid – makes it easier for organizations to take advantage of this comprehensive range of capabilities. I recommend that any organization looking to improve the customer experience assess how the Genesys portfolio can help those efforts.

Regards,

Richard J. Snow

VP & Research Director