Genesys Leverages its Expertise for the EnterpriseGenesys Leverages its Expertise for the Enterprise
Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company, has traditionally been known as a contact center vendor, with its roots in CTI. Over the past few years, the company has slowly been transforming itself into an Enterprise Software provider. At its annual analyst conference in San Francisco last week, Genesys executives and representatives noted that the company is morphing from a pure play contact center player to a company that helps its customers provide great customer service across the enterprise. While Genesys continues to stay focused on customer service, more and more of its customers are focused on going beyond customer service to improving business processes as well. To that end, Genesys' mission is to be a "Leading provider of enterprise software and best practices that enable best in class customer service, including sales, through interaction management customer service across the enterprise." The company claims that now it is a contact ex-centric company, providing value to companies outside of the contact center as well.
February 8, 2008
Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company, has traditionally been known as a contact center vendor, with its roots in CTI. Over the past few years, the company has slowly been transforming itself into an Enterprise Software provider. At its annual analyst conference in San Francisco last week, Genesys executives and representatives noted that the company is morphing from a pure play contact center player to a company that helps its customers provide great customer service across the enterprise. While Genesys continues to stay focused on customer service, more and more of its customers are focused on going beyond customer service to improving business processes as well. To that end, Genesys' mission is to be a "Leading provider of enterprise software and best practices that enable best in class customer service, including sales, through interaction management customer service across the enterprise." The company claims that now it is a contact ex-centric company, providing value to companies outside of the contact center as well.
Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company, has traditionally been known as a contact center vendor, with its roots in CTI. Over the past few years, the company has slowly been transforming itself into an Enterprise Software provider. At its annual analyst conference in San Francisco last week, Genesys executives and representatives noted that the company is morphing from a pure play contact center player to a company that helps its customers provide great customer service across the enterprise. While Genesys continues to stay focused on customer service, more and more of its customers are focused on going beyond customer service to improving business processes as well. To that end, Genesys' mission is to be a "Leading provider of enterprise software and best practices that enable best in class customer service, including sales, through interaction management customer service across the enterprise." The company claims that now it is a contact ex-centric company, providing value to companies outside of the contact center as well.What I particularly liked was the concept of "Customer Service 3.0," which is a proactive approach (based on Genesys' Dynamic Contact Center) that reaches out and takes steps to help customers. With Customer Service 3.0, Genesys sees contact centers extending to enterprises and branch offices, leveraging resources inside and outside of the enterprise to help with customer service.
With a vision of using software to transform customer service, Genesys is trying to go beyond providing efficiency tools for knowledge workers and is working with its customers to differentiate their customer service. Genesys makes it clear that it is working with highly managed and metric-ed business processes, and not general productivity. To that end, Genesys is differentiating itself from some Unified Communications vendors that focus on individual worker or personal productivity.
I like where Genesys is going with this, although I have a problem with some of its naming conventions. Jumping on the Communication Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) bandwagon, Genesys now refers to its Business Process Routing (BPR) product as CEBP. Genesys BPR or CEBP intelligently routes all interactions, including voice, e-mail, chat, white mail (scanned), fax, SMS and work items. Genesys is leveraging its history in the customer experience realm, and bringing that together with its focus on integrating with business processes. While these two areas started as two separate threads, they are now converging.
I also like the fact that Genesys is not claiming to be a "leading UC vendor" the way so many other companies do even when it's not true. Instead, Genesys states that it is leveraging UC but not trying to provide UC. I strongly support Genesys' position - taking advantage of and utilizing UC while focusing on the customer experience, which is its expertise.
2007 was a transformational year for Genesys, with many new CEBP (BPR) customers, several with over 1,500 seats. Let's see if 2008 proves even more so.
