Genesys Out to “Save the World From Bad Customer Service”

Transcript for Genesys Out to “Save the World From Bad Customer Service”

Blair Pleasant: Hi, this is Blair Pleasant with COMMfusion and UCStrategies and I am at the Genesys Analyst Conference. With me are Tom Eggemeier and Nicolas de Kouchkovsky. They gave some great information about what Genesys is doing and some of the changes that we are seeing. Nicolas, tell us about the campaign to save the world from bad customer service. What does that mean and how are you going to go about doing that?

Nicolas de Kouchkovsky: What it means is that there is approximately half a trillion dollars being spent annually by companies to establish their brand. And the reality in today’s world is that the brand ends up being defined by the experience we offer to our customers. And in many cases, those experiences are being defined by customer service and they are bad experiences.

So we have a cause at Genesys to save the world from bad customer service. What it means is that – and this is a call to action – enterprises should treat their dealings with customers as a conversation. Being able to connect customers through the channel of their choice, to be able to help them with the right resources that may be inside a contact center or anywhere else into the organization. And finally, remember them, their context, and why they are calling the company.

Blair: You also mentioned yesterday that one of your goals is to reduce total cost of ownership. How are you going to go about doing that?

Nicolas: It’s actually a strategy we have had for quite a while. It is getting elevated in our priority agenda and it is based on a three-legged strategy. Number one on the product side, we are working to unify all the user experiences. With Genesys 8, we merge all the user experiences into four, and Administrator to configure the product, Composer to define the experience, Interaction Workspace to handle the interaction from an agent perspective, and Performance Workspace to monitor and optimize the operation. So that is one element.

The second element is to enable consolidation of the software into the cloud model that the company wants. It can be a private cloud, it can be a public cloud, it can be hybrid. So those two elements are critical and there are many more simplifications that are coming, in particular, in our hosted provider edition version of the software. So that is point number one.

Point number two is being able to address the desire from customers to consume technology using SaaS. And we do that with numerous hosted partners that address the various market segments that exist.

Finally, and this is going to be a big change, is that we decided to open up much more than we have done in the past, the intellectual and human capital of our services organization. So it can be in the context of our largest customers where they have a customer experience transformation project to help them and guide them. It is also with our partners to enable them by passing them all our methodologies, tools, and IP that we have built over the years.

Blair: Okay, great. Thank you. Tom, you talked about how Genesys has the opportunity to go from being a great brand to an iconic brand. Can you talk about how you are going to do that?

Tom Eggemeier: Sure. When you think of iconic companies like Apple, they usually do have a cause. So it is related to what Nicolas said about save the world from bad customer service. We see customer frustration at an all-time high, whether it is someone tweeting about something, to liking a page on Facebook or social media. And when they do that, they do not even get a response. Seventy-five percent of people who use social media to talk to a company do not even get a response. MSNBC ran a show about 45 days ago about the endless frustration of going through an IVR that is not designed properly and you cannot get a human being. So there is heightened frustration right now that technology has actually prevented good customer service rather than enhancing. And we believe we are uniquely positioned at Genesys to really save the world from bad customer service.

I give the analogy that when I was in France, actually, for the past five years; I had excellent customer service with those vendors that I knew well – the local grocery store, the dry cleaners – because I personally knew them. And we have kind of lost that globally, that great personal customer service, over the last 40 or 50 years. And now with technology, instead of it being an inhibitor to great customer service, it really can provide that great customer service if you get the right person in the company to talk to their customer at the right time with the right context. And we really believe at Genesys that we are able to do that and we can really enhance our customers’ customer experience. And that is really going to take us from a great to an iconic company when we really take customer frustration down significantly and save the world from bad customer service.

Blair: Excellent. So now that Genesys is a newly independent company, what would you like channel partners to know and understand about how things are going to be going forward?

Tom: Well, I guess first of all, I want channel partners to know they are an incredibly important part of our ecosystem. Right now, we do over 50 percent of our business in North America with channel partners, and we do well over 90 percent of our business in the rest of the world in the EMEA, Latin America, and Asia Pacific through channel partners. We recognize the value of channel partners. They bring skills, sales, post sales, pre sales, different products, to create a whole solution to the table. So first, channel partners are absolutely important.

Second, we have reinvested in channel partners. Mike McBrien has become our new lead of global sales for the channel partners, the global partners. And we have not had this position at Genesys for four or five years. We really see the value of channel partners. We will have a great dialogue, I hope, over the next 12 months with you on what we should become together in front of our joint customers. And hopefully, we will get a really great channel program out of those discussions.

Blair: And what about as Genesys moves forward in the SaaS market? How are you helping channel partners in that area?

Tom: Well, right now, I look at Nicolas here a little bit, about a hundred percent of our SaaS right now, our subscription-based service, is through channel partners. I think it is one of the best-kept secrets in the marketplace right now where we talked over the last couple days how we have over 25,000 seats in North American alone of SaaS. We have street value contracts of over a hundred million dollars – not with Genesys’ value, unfortunately. And we have customers ranging from 10 seats, 10 people, to 10,000, in SaaS. So we really see a huge opportunity with SaaS with our channel partners. We believe in the subscription-based model and we have got some great partners out there that are doing great things and we really want to expand on with our partners.

Nicolas: So we created a version of Genesys called Hosted Provider Edition; the bundle was actually created based on the guidance of our hosted partners. And it actually is set up in kind of a user group that is guiding the roadmap for this product. So we have simplified the assembly of the different elements. We baked into this bundle the capabilities that are required to operate smoothly a SaaS business. So that is one element that we are doing with those partners.

The second element that you may not see is that we are enabling them with tools to successfully market those offering it into their target markets. And because it is a partner-led approach to the market, you do not necessarily see these elements in the way our various partners are going to market.

Blair: Thank you both very much and congratulations on a wonderful conference and being newly independent.

Tom: Thanks, Blair.

Nicolas: Thank you.