I recently attended Genesys’ Analyst & Influencer Summit, an event that connected me with leaders at Genesys, and their partners and customers.

I don’t attend that many of these events; given my positioning I don’t easily sit within the analyst and influencer buckets – but it was interesting to attend and observe the topics that were addressed, the announcements that were made and the questions asked by the other invited analysts and consultants.

Of the announcements and the discussions, these highlights stood out for me:

• Details of Genesys’ recent acquisitions (Bold360, Pointillist and Exceed.ai) and how these are enhancing their offerings in the Experience as a Service market and how that helps deliver empathetic customer and employee experiences at scale,
• The shift from experience automation to experience orchestration across not just service-related experiences but also sales and marketing, too,
• How they are presenting themselves as a cloud-based experience orchestration company with a growing portfolio beyond their contact centre leadership that spans:
  • Genesys Cloud CX – their Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) and Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) solutions.
  • Genesys Multicloud CX – their multi-cloud solution that responds to the complex requirements of global brands.
  • Genesys DX – a standalone digital customer engagement offering that combines conversational AI, messaging, predictive engagement and dynamic knowledge base capabilities.

What fascinated me with their announcements was the intentional change in messaging – Genesys, a market leader in contact centre software/CCaaS, is now an experience orchestration platform play. It makes sense and I’m starting to hear similar ideas emerge from vendors in a variety of markets. As I was listening I did wonder how this new vision would play out for vendors whose core business isn’t in the contact centre space. I’ll be keeping an eye on the Genesys Go-To-Market strategy as they, engage with sales and marketing buyers, very different audiences.

Regardless of that, I was excited by the roadmap, particularly the emphasis on employees and the agent’s experience as important but overlooked stakeholders.

Recently, Genesys’ research, The State of CX, found that despite a massive shift to digital, the last two years have shown us the hugely important part that agents and live channels play in delivering a great customer experience.

Digital channels and automation will continue to develop and mature, allowing customers to increasingly self-serve and take care of simpler and more routine enquiries.

However, when a customer’s query is important, complex or their issue is fraught with emotion, then it is likely that they will seek out help from an agent.

That means that live channels will remain important.

Leading organisations understand this and know that interactions with agents are a critical and important part of a customer’s experience and can make or break a customer’s relationship with a brand if not handled well.

So, focusing on the employee, particularly the agent’s, experience is great to see.

While this will come together in a variety of ways, including making us of their AI capabilities it aligns with something that I have written about in the past…..the emerging landscape of service.

That article suggested that we have become comfortable talking about customer experience….a landscape that encompasses preemptive service, predictive service, proactive service, self-service, and assisted and enabled service. But, given the importance of getting it right when customers require the direct help of an agent, we are now seeing the emergence of agent experience space that is likely to have all of the same landscape elements that the customer experience has…. Assisted Service for agents, Self-Service for agents, Proactive Service for agents, Predictive Service for agents and Preemptive Service for agents. These facilities aim to improve efficiency, reduce effort, enable agents, and drive better customer outcomes like their customer counterparts.

As part of the article, I asked Andy Haas, Service Transformation Practice Leader at Deloitte Digital, for his view on when we would see a platform like this emerge. He reckoned that “we are still 2-5 years away from seeing all of these elements being integrated into one platform.”

So, based on Genesys’ announcements, focus and roadmap, it looks as though they and the customers and partners we heard from are way ahead of the curve.

That’s pretty exciting. I am looking forward to learning more as these customers scale their use of the experience orchestration platform, and as Genesys partners help more customers bring this vision to life.

Thanks to geralt on Pixabay for the image.