Genesys has integrated its cloud customer engagement solution PureCloud with Amazon's Lex, a service for building conversational interfaces into applications using voice and text.
With an eye on helping businesses enhance customer experiences, the integration leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to enable them to build and maintain conversational interactive voice response (IVR) flows for routing callers.
"This is a next step in terms of bringing these next-generation AI capabilities in a democratized way," says Dan Rood, vice president of product marketing at Genesys.
"A lot of these AI services in our space are complicated and can be costly," says Rood, who points out that PureCloud can bring AI capabilities just as much to small and midsized businesses as it can for larger enterprises.
The integration, Rood adds, shows that Genesys can "build en masse capabilities that are just going to continue to evolve and improve and become an integral part of serving customers up and down the market.”
More specifically, PureCloud customers can harness Amazon Lex's ability to understand natural language, which empowers IVR flows to recognize not only what customers are saying, but also their intent. That, hopefully, will increase first-call resolution by contact center agents.
Additionally, the integration will allow companies to consolidate multiple interactions into a single flow that can be applied to different self-service channels, with the goal of reducing the number of call flows needed and simplifying contact center administration and support.
"The big story for us is the democratization element. It's one thing to have really cool technology that enables enhanced customer support and customer experience, but it's another thing to make it incredibly consumable for companies of all sizes and segments," Rood says.
The integration will be available to customers in 2018.