Genesys' Lisa Abbott Discusses New Genesys Cloud Connect

In this conversation with UCStrategies' Blair Pleasant, Genesys' Lisa Abbott discusses the new Genesys Cloud Connect, the new SaaS offering for Salesforce.com Service Cloud customers. Lisa Abbott is Senior Director of Global Product Marketing for Cloud Connect at Genesys.

Also on UCStrategies.com on this topic:

• Genesys Brings Customer Service to the Cloud at Dreamforce 2012, by Paul Robinson

Blair Pleasant: Hi, this is Blair Pleasant and I'm at Dreamforce in San Francisco. And with me is Lisa Abbott from Genesys. Lisa is now the Senior Director of Global Product Marketing for Cloud Connect. Lisa, what's Cloud Connect?

Lisa Abbott: Well, Genesys Cloud Connect is our new offering that we have brought to market with a new partnership that we are doing with SalesForce.

Blair: Why is Genesys partnering with SalesForce?

Lisa: You look at Genesys and SalesForce as being really two marquis brands out there. SalesForce is clearly the leader out there with 50% of the market share; Genesys was very interested in aggressively going after this new market area. And we saw that SalesForce was a very good fit for us from what we both could bring to the table.

Blair: So tell us a little bit about this new cloud offering that you have.

Lisa: Genesys Connect is our voice offering in the Cloud. What we have done is tightly integrated and provided a native application within the SalesForce Service Cloud environment. And basically, the Service Cloud customers will not have to leave the SalesForce portal at all to be able to add contact center connectivity to their multi-channel environment.

Blair: So for people who aren't too familiar with Service Cloud, can you tell us what that is and also what it is that Genesys provides that SalesForce doesn't provide.

Lisa: Service Cloud by SalesForce is their service offering in the cloud. And that brings to the table both social and multi-channel capability and self-service. And from a Genesys perspective, we are bringing the voice or the conversations to Service Cloud.

Blair: And that is why everyone should look at your t-shirt.

Lisa: Yes, yes that's right, "My cloud has a voice, does yours?" I also would like to invite people who are here attending Dreamforce to stop by the Genesys booth, #428, to actually see our integrated offer, but also to share your voice with us. For every recording of either a positive or a negative customer service experience, we are donating $100 to the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital in San Francisco.

Blair: Okay, so Genesys provides the voice to the Service Cloud, is that correct?

Lisa: Yes, that is correct.

Blair: What other capabilities does it provide? Tell us about the joint offering and what it provides to customers.

Lisa: From a Genesys perspective, we are bringing the voice to the Service Cloud customers and so in this first version of our integration, we are basically providing the telephony capabilities to set up your own contact center. And so based on Genesys's 20-plus years of experience, we have developed this native application that allows the Service Cloud customers to be able to access everything from one area of the portal for their Service Cloud. They are able to leverage a library of templates that we have built, based on our best practices of 20-plus years of experience. And you know, to give you a little insight of what 21 years brings, we have 1.3 million agents and 100,000 interactions that take place daily across the globe on Genesys software.

Blair: Who are the target customers for this offering?

Lisa: We are primarily targeting the Sales Force Service Cloud customers or any of the SalesForce customers that are planning to move over to Service Cloud from maybe Sales Cloud or Marketing Cloud, who will be looking at adding a contact center, or telephony capabilities to their multi-channel experience.

Blair: Now Genesys already has some hosted offerings, so where does this fit in with your other hosted services?

Lisa: That is correct, Genesys has over 1,000 customers right now that are hosted through our partners. Primarily our partners tend to focus on our large enterprise area of the business, which is predominantly where we sell our on-premise offering. So they address that and we also see our partners primarily covering the smaller end of the market. What we are hoping to accomplish here and to meet a gap that we saw in the market, was to partner with SalesForce and really go after that middle market, the type of company that is looking for less complexity, as well as a quicker speed to go to market. And we are hoping to enable and empower those customers to be able to respond to the competitive nature of the market these days.

Blair: Perfect, well thank you so much Lisa and good luck with your new offering.

Lisa: Thank you.