Genesys Influencer Event Expands Reach Into Experience Orchestration

I recently had an opportunity to be part of a group of industry influencers – including analysts and consultants – who had a private audience with Genesys customers, partners and executives to hear their vision of what I would call Experience Orchestration. Guest speakers included:

• Tony Bates, Chairman and CEO on Experience as a Service, Experience Orchestration
• Barry O’Sullivan, EVP & GM, Brett Weigl, SVP Product Management on Powering Experience Orchestration with Digital and AI,
• Olivier Jouve, EVP and GM, Mike Szilagyi, SVP, Product Management & Chief of Operations on Genesys Cloud CX
• John Hernandez, EVP & General Manager, Tod Famous, SVP Product Management, Amy Roberge Coleman, VP Technology Solutions Engineering on Orchestrating a Multi-Vendor Customer Experience

Genesys for the last 24 months has been leveraging the phrase, “Experience as a Service” (vs. the defacto Contact Center as a Service, or CCaaS). This title reflects the way Genesys and its customers are considering people's increasing demand for empathy and personalized customer experiences.

We are all aware at this point that, since 2020, customer experience now surpasses product and price as the main drivers for doing business with any organization. This, of course, leads to better response times for voice, chat, email and other channels in the Contact Center. Callbacks and estimated wait times have helped reduce the dreaded “abandoned call rates,” improving on call completion, no matter what the channel.

Genesys’ focus at their Summit was describing Experience Orchestration within the dynamics of the Experience as a Service market they and their partners see taking shape. For context, many companies still optimize business from within, a standard used in contact centers for years. This includes measuring first call resolution, customer churn, Net Promoter scores, cost for a call, revenue per employee, the list goes on and on.

Genesys is now taking it a step further and including empathy as a key component for Experience Orchestration. Key concepts may include “knowing who I am” to identify the individual the first time; “understanding how I feel” by using AI to identify speech and emojis to support an empathetic experience; “Knowing what the customer needs up front” based upon recent activity on the customer account; and including phrases such as “don't waste my time” or “please delight me” as the new gold standard when working with customers. We are in a phase of evolution, according to Tony Bates, where we are moving from a business-centric environment to a people-centric environment.

This movement from business centric to people centric includes the following areas:

Experience orchestration, in my opinion, focuses on getting to empathetic and emotional connections with a customer (or citizen in the case of government entities, or patient within the healthcare context) by focusing on (1) listening, (2) understanding the need and predicting the outcome, (3) acting immediately on the solution, and (4) learning how to improve on that experience for the next time.

Whenever I meet with our clients today and mention customer experience (CX), patient experience (PX), member experience (MX), and now employee experience (EX), I find that now all my clients are listening. Various stakeholders from contact center supervisors to senior management, all of the organizations we consult with realize the importance of engaging customers with much better experiences. This leads to more satisfied customers, which leads to the longevity and loyalty of those customers and more revenue and referrals.

In my opinion, it is critical to understand that the contact center, while often an entry point into an organization, can also be a frontline for that customer experience. Customers are not at all opposed to having a conversation via a chat or receiving a response to an SMS chat or appointment reminder if that resolves the issue quickly and efficiently. This means considering the digital experience, and it means digital capabilities and the effective use of AI are now critical components for evolved contact centers.

For example, I had to get my home cable provider on site for service after having outages in each of the past five days. On the day of my scheduled service I ran into extensive traffic that was preventing me from making it home in time for the appointment. I called the vendor to let them know I was running late and asked to move the appointment by 20 minutes. My call was answered by an IVR that seemed to have no knowledge of my appointment; however, the IVR was set up to voluntarily check the quality of the Internet connection, which of course, had nothing to do with the reason I made the appointment. This delayed my transfer in speaking with an agent directly by three minutes. More than that, it was frustrating. At first the agent couldn’t find my record. After looking through a couple of screens my appointment was located and the agent was able to alert the technician who arrived shortly after me. The technician was able to resolve the issue quickly. This was a classic example of a disconnected contact center with a limited-use frontend IVR that had poor integration into the databases with my information. And yet the technician and even the live agent in the contact center were far more empathetic than the experience was set up to be. It's as if this company was so used to operating behind a wall of IVRs they’d lost touch with how and when to empower their people and why that’s so important.

We obviously need to personalize the customer experience, and this is where better tools and designing beneficial experiences can help. An AI bot should be able to say, “Hello Steve,” and realize why I'm calling. And if that doesn’t work well, or if I just want to talk with a human, the contact center rep should immediately know what my issue is before I even ask my question. And with the Genesys’ Experience Orchestration ideas I saw and heard at the Genesys Summit, the agent should then be able to move me forward to a successful outcome in real time. We need more people-centric outcomes that leverage a digital experience and AI digital engagement. Let the AI tools identify the need quickly and efficiently for basic needs, including an appointment confirmation as an example, and expand that need to a live individual specialist who can quickly and efficiently correct the problem or find a solution.

Experience orchestration action may include the following with a live agent:

• The agent having a full history of the interaction to personalize and empathize with the experience (and to be trained accordingly to these new algorithms)
• The customer’s history of their customer journey fully visible to the agent
• Throughout the call, the agent is presented with next best suggested responses through AI tools as suggested responses
• Feedback from the agent is automatically gathered and fed back into the platform, using established tools such as speech analytics and text analytics

So is this just a bunch of hype, or is this a real trend towards engaging and retaining customers? After two days with Genesys, it’s the latter, for sure. Forward-thinking companies that orchestrate experience and lead with empathy will build loyalty with any customer for years to come. To not do so puts your organization at risk.

It’s time to re-invent contact center experiences, and build new models beyond the traditional contact center, where businesses can transform transactional customer interactions into empathetic, orchestrated experiences that are proactive, predictive, and personalized for every customer across any touchpoint. This will to create that “experience orchestration” as Tony Bates and his team, including partners, so well displayed during this Summit.