Genesys Brings Customer Service to the Cloud at Dreamforce 2012

Last week at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 2012 event, Genesys staked out new turf in the cloud with the announced launch of its Genesys Connect for Service Cloud solution built natively on the Salesforce Platform.

Product Key Features

• Genesys Connect natively leverages the Service Cloud user interface and administrative environment to ensure that the integrated solution is quick to deploy, easy to administer and simple to use for agents and employees across the voice, social, web and mobile customer channels offering everything needed to have great customer conversations and improved customer service, including:
  • IP cloud telephony to route calls to employees. Calls can be handled through a voice application or connected through the software to a local phone
  • Integrated voice response (IVR) to guide call routing and offer self-service alternatives
  • Voice mail
  • Call recording
  • Reporting and management to track the customer experience
  • Customer surveys
• The new service introduces pre-defined templates for customer interaction routing using business rules and customer data:
  • Route incoming calls to the best person using customer segmentation based on Salesforce data, such as customer value, products or location
  • Play an initial welcome greeting to reinforce company branding and image, then route customers according to their selections or availability of customer representatives
  • Route incoming calls to the last agent that worked with the customer (last agent routing)
  • Offer alternative support channels based on working hours, holidays, etc.
  • Display a customer record “screen pop” based on the customer ID or the caller ID

“It’s a new day for Genesys,” said Michael McBrien, General Manager of the new Genesys Cloud Connect business unit. “For more than 20 years, Genesys has worked with the largest and most sophisticated enterprises in the world to transform their customer service, while simultaneously saving them money – lots of money. With Genesys Connect for Service Cloud, we are taking these insights and combining them with Salesforce and a cloud delivery model to create a solution that is profoundly powerful, yet easy to deploy and simple to use.”

What This Means to You

To Customers: Service Cloud provides companies with a call center-like view that enables companies to create and track cases coming in from every channel, and automatically route and escalate what’s important. The addition of Genesys Connect adds both voice interactions to Service Cloud, creating one place to manage all customer interactions, and flexible and intelligent interaction routing based on differentiated end user-designed business rules and customer data.

To Partners: The new Genesys Cloud Connect business unit could lead to friction in the channel down the road. Up until this point Genesys sold SaaS contact center solutions through its Hosted Service Provider (HSP) channel. HSPs are considered a direct extension of Genesys’ sales and support organizations and deliver value-added services wrapped around Genesys’ hosted solution software. With the introduction of Genesys Connect for Service Cloud the company is targeting a small piece of the overall addressable SaaS market for contact center services, but this is likely to change down the road.

Also on UCStrategies.com on this topic:

• Genesys' Lisa Abbott Discusses New Genesys Cloud Connect, by Blair Pleasant