Genesys has seen tremendous growth in the past four years, Olivier Jouve, the company's chief product officer, said on the second day of its Xperience 2023 conference in Denver.
Four years is a benchmark of sorts because this was the first Xperience conference since 2019 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Four years ago, most of you were still on-premises; now 85 percent of our customers are in the cloud," Jouve said, noting that four years ago, 86,000 agents using Genesys were in the cloud; now that number exceeds 1 million.
The company is fully committed to the cloud, Jouve said.
The company has also grown tremendously in the number of customers who are using only digital services, with a 229 percent increase in digital interactions and 63 percent in voice.
Jouve also touted his company's success with workforce engagement management and the embedded artificial intelligence.
"We understand the data challenges that you face," Jouve said, adding that his company's success in understanding those data challenges helped it win new business, including its first customers in the Dubai in the United Arab Emiratess and Osaka, Japan, which should all be live by the end of the year.
Jouve also reiterated Genesys' commitment "to being good stewards of your AI and data."
Genesys is also focused on improving the employee experience, which it sees as critical to improving CX, Jouve said, referencing the Genesys Experience Index, also introduced at the conference. The index can provide insights into actions that detract from customer engagement and loyalty. The index combines human sentiment with industry benchmarks and data from the Genesys Cloud CX platform and other sources to help organizations pinpoint where experiences go wrong and what needs to be done to fix them.
"Employees want to be empowered. Employees are brand ambassadors and experience creators," Jouve said. "AI-powered journey management is the key."
Genesys Cloud CX General Manager Mike Szilagyi added that siloed systems make it much harder for contact centers to compete, which he said drives Genesis to develop a seamless, modern cloud platform that reducess complexity and put customer and employee in middle of customer experiences.
<p."Some companies overlook the employee experience," Szilagyi said. "But EX now leads CX. You must prioritize your most valuable asset—your employees—so that they exceed customer expectations."
"Data is the backbone," Szilagyi said. Data helps inform routing decisions to route interactions to the right agent to provide customers with the best personalized experience. Data and supporting tools also help contact centers handle unexpected demand.
Though data is the backbone for routing calls, the best routing goes for naught if employees themselves are having poor experiences, because that will result in poor CX, according to Szilagyi. "Providing rich insights is a critical area of investment for us."
The company is committed to spending $270 million a year to improve its cloud platform. It is looking to constantly improve all elements or the platform, including speech and text analytics, while also building an empathy analysis engine, Szilagyi said.
"We have enormous velocity in the way how we can develop capability," added Peter Graf, Genesys' chief strategy and operations officer. "We're cranking out innovation at a very high pace, with about a feature a day, which is extraordinary. That's very different from the on-premises world, where you will get a couple of features every half a year to deploy."
CX and EX are converging, according to Graf. "We have the world's best platform for these types of solutions. It's highly scalable and global and secure and highly available."
Graf added: "We really believe that a great customer experience was also happening because we have a great entry experience. Putting these both on the same platform is key to our strategy. The experience you create is truly in a way how your brand lands with people. I would describe this as an experience economy first and foremost."
It's easy to lose a customer over a bad experience, Graf explained. "We understand that a lot of those frustrations from customers are actually borne from frustrations about the product that lead to frustrations with the employees in the contact center."
To improve employee interaction with customers, the Genesys platform brings together all relevant performance indicators to enable contact center managers to identify coaching opportunities, according to Graf.
Graf expects to see increased capabilities in workforce engagement management in the next year. "It's a big investment," he said. "We truly believe that a great employee experience is a prerequisite to having a great customer experience.
By the time next year' xPerience conference rolls around in mid-May, Graf expects Genesys to have more use cases for AI. "AI for us is not a piece of functionality. It's a way of building things."