How to Get Real Value From UC and CC with Genesys and Zoom

Most people understand the important role contact centers play when it comes to customer experience (CX). What’s not as well understood is the role unified communications (UC) plays and the value of connecting contact center and UC technologies to provide improved CX and employee experiences (EX).

UC and contact center platforms and capabilities are merging to help organizations improve both the customer and employee experiences. Integrating UC and contact center enables the “collaborative contact center,” where agents, supervisors, subject matter experts (SMEs), and others in the organization can collaborate together to best solve the customer’s issue. Connecting with subject matter experts from the broader organization and leveraging UC functionality increases first-call resolution (FCR), resulting in more satisfied customers, while also enhancing the agent and employee experience.

Breaking down the barriers and silos of UC and contact center creates “CX for Everyone” (CXE), where anyone within an organization, no matter where they are located, can help service customers.

Genesys and Zoom – Driving New Use Cases Together

To help their customers realize these benefits, two industry leaders – Genesys and Zoom – have been partnering to bring Genesys Cloud CX contact center and Zoom Phone capabilities together since 2020 and just last week announced an expanded commitment to helping businesses solve problems through future co-innovations. With a best-of-breed approach, Genesys and Zoom deliver a seamless experience for employees and customers. While most of the planet is familiar with Zoom Meetings, not everyone realizes that Zoom provides a full, extensible communication platform with a range of capabilities, including chat, Zoom Phone, and of course, video. Vendors like Genesys are leveraging this platform to drive new use cases and innovation. The Genesys-Zoom integration provides the ability to access Zoom Meeting and Phone capabilities, enabling instant communications to help agents engage with other employees within the organization to provide customer answers immediately, increasing both the customer and employee experiences.

At Genesys Xperience, I hosted a discussion with Peter Graf, Chief Strategy Officer for Genesys, and Oded Gal, Chief Product Officer for Zoom, to discuss their partnership and the various use cases for integrated UC and contact center solutions.

Highlights from our discussion focused on why Genesys and Zoom are working together and why organizations should consider this integrated solution:

• Changes in customer and employee experience have necessitated new approaches. As Graf noted, we live in an “experience economy” requiring a shift in strategy and approach, with empathy at the center for both customers and employees. Genesys actually put empathy into code that runs at scale to deliver significant business results.
• Employees expect better experiences, and it’s important to provide agents with access to resources within the company to help them be more effective while attaining greater job satisfaction.
• With a new focus and understanding of the importance of CX and EX, more and more organizations recognize that the contact center is the front door to customer relationships and is no longer simply a cost center.
• As opposed to legacy premises-based products, the cloud makes it possible for different vendors to seamlessly integrate their solutions.

Drilling down into the partnership, Graf explained that Genesys recognized early on that great customer experiences require great employee experiences. Zoom and Genesys teams and engineers have worked hard to provide seamless integration out of the box, and thanks to the cloud, the integration can be built once and used by all customers.

Increasingly, basic and repetitive inquiries and interactions are being handled by self-service technologies, including bots and conversational AI. The calls that reach agents are generally more complex and may require some assistance from subject matter experts in different parts of the organization, whether in sales, marketing, finance, etc. By enabling agents to reach out to a subject matter expert within the organization, agents can more quickly and effectively solve customers’ issues.

Gal explained this concept, noting that joint Genesys Cloud CX and Zoom customers can immediately connect to available employees through instant messaging and video, providing access to the right expertise and information, resulting in first contact resolution and more satisfied customers.

Graf described a typical scenario:

An agent receives a call from a customer and wants to solve the problem right away but realizes that they’re not the right person to resolve the customer’s issue. Rather than having to call the customer back, with the unified directory, presence and click-to-call, Genesys Cloud CX users can connect directly with Zoom users to solve the customer’s issue. The agent can identify the right individual or SME within the company to provide assistance and see whether they’re available on Zoom before reaching out to them, and simply click to contact them and do a warm transfer. By tapping into CRM data, the Genesys Cloud CX delivers context to the SME when transferring the call to drive home the solution to the problem.

Gal expanded, explaining that Zoom makes it easy for the agent or SME to send a link to the customer to start a meeting and share a screen. In another scenario, during a chat interaction with a customer, the agent determines that it’s best to share a screen. The agent simply creates a Zoom Meeting and shares the link with the customer via the chat. Using Zoom Meeting to continue the engagement, the expert can guide the customer and they can view documents and screens together. Going across different media, this approach uses the full power of video and voice together in a way that wasn’t previously possible.

These scenarios apply to many vertical industry examples, including insurance claims, finance (think mortgage applications), healthcare, and other situations where an agent may need to bring in back-office expertise. The possibilities are endless.

Getting Started

For customers using Zoom and Genesys Cloud CX today, getting started is simple. All it takes is downloading the Zoom Connector from the Genesys AppFoundry (app store) to start realizing the benefits of an integrated UC and contact center experience. The Genesys AppFoundry includes integrations for Zoom Meetings and Genesys Cloud Integration for Zoom Phone.

Zoom Meetings customers should consider adding Zoom Phone to get the full benefit. Zoom Phone customers can go to the Zoom App Marketplace or the Genesys AppFoundry to activate the free trial.

For more insights about how Genesys and Zoom are working together and to view the entire session, go to https://xperience.genesys.com/s/genesys-xperience/home.