Genesys, Ready for the Next Digital Wave, Announces Intent to Acquire Bold360 from LogMeIn

Introduction

On March 16, 2021, Genesys announced their intent to acquire Bold360 from LogMeIn. Bold360 currently offers:

• Technology that humanizes the customer experience (CX) at every point in the journey: from exploring options to making purchases and seeking support
• Best-in-class knowledge management ensures that customers and employees get reliable answers fast
• Unified agent workspace, which streamlines engagements across digital channels into one intuitive interface.

Bold360 is known in the industry for its leading digital capabilities, including its conversational AI, dynamic knowledge base and intuitive agent experience. Bold360 is recognized by industry analysts, and has been chosen by some of the largest businesses in the world, including Vodafone, Royal Bank of Scotland, Fannie Mae and Timberland, among others.

So Why Such a Move?

Why such a move? Genesys has announced earlier that they are all-in for the Cloud CCaaS platform and Customer Experience/CX, or as Genesys terms “Experience as a Service (EaaS).” Genesys is also all-in for the digital trends taking place in the marketplace. Some predictions around digital trends include:

• Forrester predicts that digital customer service interactions will increase by 40% in 2021. [1]
• IDC predicts that 65% of organizations in 2021 will have shifted to digital-first through automated operations and contactless experiences for customer service[2]
• Genesys also shows that the number of digital customers grew for Genesys at 80% year over year in Fiscal Year 2021:[3]
  • Triple-digit growth in customers using at least two channels
  • Digital interactions have increased more than 300% YoY
  • Digital interactions make up about 15% of all interactions

According to Gartner, "By 2025, 40% of customer service organizations will become profit centers by becoming de facto leaders in digital customer engagement."[4]

COVID-19 clearly accelerated cloud acceptance and growth by 24-36 months. A Walker analyst study done eight years ago predicted that “by the year 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.” In my own personal experience with clients, I found this to be true. All executives we interface with today are all sensitized towards customer experience (CX), patient experience (PX), member experience (MX), and more. The pandemic has moved the needle forward and accelerated CX even faster, as it has done with the cloud.

According to Genesys, Bold360's complementary capabilities with the Genesys AI and data platform and partner ecosystem will enable companies to deliver experiences that are fluid, context-based and personalized across any part of their business or channel. With the Bold360 acquisition, Genesys will continue to accelerate its vision of “Experience as a Service,” and will help reimagine how empathy can link marketing, sales and service experiences for customers. This last statement parallels Gartner’s statement about 40% of customer service groups becoming profit centers.

According to Genesys, EaaS will make it possible for companies to predict customer behavior before they act. This will deliver a more effective and empathetic CX. Customer engagement and service are key to being more strategic as customers move from a cost center to a revenue accelerator.

Bold360 will join the Genesys Digital business unit led by Barry O'Sullivan, Genesys’ Executive Vice President and General Manager. The acquisition is expected to build on the company's momentum in the market that includes exceptional cloud growth and more than 800 new customers on Genesys Cloud™ and Genesys Engage Multicloud™ in fiscal year 2021.

In 2012, LogMeIn acquired digital engagement technology from Bold Software for $16.5 million. In 2017, LogMeIn acquired AI and chatbot self-service vendor Nanorep, a $50 million acquisition (an Israeli startup).

At its industry analyst meeting in December 2020, Genesys shared its focus on increasing the total addressable market for the company. Following the event, Genesys announced a new Digital business unit. Bold360 is Genesys’ second-largest acquisition in its history. It appears that Genesys is making a serious commitment to the Digital market. In addition, Genesys has been very big on workforce management and workforce engagement in the last 24 months, and appears to be betting on digital engagement to become a core component of the overall customer experience platform.

Why This Particular Acquisition is Strategic for Genesys

Genesys clearly is betting on the future and where customer experience is headed. In the last 24 months, I have seen UCD groups and hunt groups now become contact center groups and the investment for such with many of our clients. This is simply because clients are now very aware, in my opinion, that customer experience is now front and center. If the client does not address this key area of their business, they will eventually lose to the competition. Customer experience has become key with every executive that I work with.

We've been discussing for years the idea of a multi-channel or omnichannel experience. These channels include voice, email, fax, chat, video, and social media. AI has since expanded these channels, helping customers quickly get what they need. Simple requests by customers can be accomplished quickly with the AI interface, and anything more complex can be transferred to a live agent. AI also provides prompted responses to an agent based upon a set of criteria and current customer discussions to provide a better customer response. AI shares with the agent emotional ties of the interaction that can facilitate empathetic responses.

Workforce Management has since expanded on Workforce Engagement, and includes AI and other elements to clearly provide extremely responsive agent engagement, including an average speed of answer within seconds versus some contact centers that are within minutes.

Genesys is intent on making Experience as a Service an industry acronym, and is embracing what Bold360 has to offer – technology that humanizes the customer experience (CX) at every point in the journey, knowledge management, and unified agent workspace. By responding to market trends (Forrester’s prediction of digital interactions to increase by 40% in 2021, and IDC’s prediction this year that 65% of organizations will have shifted to digital-first as two examples), Genesys is planning on offering customers an emboldened experience beyond what we are currently experiencing today.

Conclusion

Yes, COVID has accelerated the move to the cloud and for Customer Experience. Genesys, in my opinion, is responding to this accelerated need in the market and leading with CX tools that will create even richer customer experiences going forward. Bold360 is one such acquisition to embrace the new digital trends taking place in the contact center space, and allowing Genesys to expand into new markets such as digital-first customer experience.