Genesys Unveils New Customer Engagement ModelGenesys Unveils New Customer Engagement Model
New G-Nine customer success model brings in AI, bots, IoT, asynchronous messaging, and app automation to enhance the digital customer experience.
May 22, 2017
Genesys opened its CX17 customer experience conference today in Indianapolis with a promise to deliver "the best of G-Force and Interactions in one." For those unfamiliar, G-Force had been Genesys's customer and analyst event and Interactions had been the same for Interactive Intelligence, which Genesys acquired last August. In an opening-day press and analyst briefing, Genesys unveiled its next-generation customer engagement platform, called G-Nine.
As I learned in a pre-briefing with Genesys CMO Merijn te Booij, G-Nine is the company's "innovation framework" that will guide all of the company's product releases from January 2018 through December 2019. In this release, Genesys aims to address the needs of companies that want "easy, effective and personalized service, as well as from organizations that are challenged to keep up with customer behavior and expectations -- not to mention the pace and cost of technological innovation," te Booij said in a prepared statement.
Genesys outlined five innovations as part of the G-Nine model:
Smart App Automation -- an automation platform features 80-plus pre-defined micro-applications for voice and digital self-service. A big part of G-Nine is "smart" -- smart use cases and models associated with them, te Booij told me. Initially these micro-apps will link to PureEngage (formerly Genesys Enterprise Edition) omnichannel customer engagement platform. An example of such an application is for name confirmation where customers can enter their names in via text instead of verbally spelling out a difficult to spell name, te Booij said.
Asynchronous Messaging -- support for popular asynchronous messaging channels such as Slack, Facebook Messenger, Skype, and WeChat is now available through the Genesys Hub
Next-Generation Engagement -- Adds Internet of Things (IoT) into the customer experience view, to gain context around real-time customer interactions
Bring-Your-Own-Bot -- Companies can integrate bots of their choice into the customer experience platform; the bots will blend with native Genesys artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning systems to lend deeper insights into customer interactions. That Genesys is allowing integration of third-party bots into G-Nine is indicative of the big future it sees for bots -- and the need to connect those bots to customer engagement, te Booij. To note, bots will not be replacing agents, he added. Rather, the platform will monitor the conversations to see if the bot is missing the point or is exhibiting low accuracy. "If the bot accuracy is under 90%, we take control of the conversation and escalate to a human agent."
Personified AI -- "Kate," for customer service-specific AI, features micro-apps and natural language understanding, and will blend capabilities from other AI systems, such as Salesforce Einstein or IBM Watson, into the Genesys ecosystem
To learn what else might be expected at CX17, I checked in with Sheila McGee-Smith, contact center analyst and close Genesys watcher. On her mind, she said, is whether Genesys will be making some of the G-Nine innovations, such as asynchronous messaging or bring-your-own-bot, available as part of legacy Interactive Intelligence solutions.
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