Red Hat has chosen the Genesys Customer Experience Platform Business Edition to provide a new hybrid cloud-based legacy system which allows Red Hat to build its first global universal queue to manage voice interactions with new routing technology.
"The reason that we chose the Genesys solution is that it supports our strategy of moving to a hybrid cloud implementation for much of our IT," says Lee Congdon, chief information officer at Red Hat. "It's scalable, global, and flexible. We've been able to migrate our legacy structure to the Genesys cloud solution...from a business perspective, very cleanly. We're already getting positive feedback from our business partners in sales and service organizations."
Scott Kolman, Genesys vice president of solutions and product marketing, says that for Genesys, the agreement is an endorsement of the cloud approach from a multinational company, and highlights the platform's call routing technology that will be used by Red Hat's 300 agents in more than 30 countries.
Within Red Hat's legacy or classic solution, the company didn't have extensive redundancy around the globe, says Congdon, but with the Genesys solution, the company now has the ability to move calls anywhere.
"[The solution] has the ability to support SIP [Session Initiation Protocol] so that a person doesn't physically have to sit in a contact center," says Kolman. "The platform supports broad geographic coverage while still maintaining business rules and defines who the right agent is through agent profiles to determine specific skills such as language and availability."
Genesys Business Edition's routing capabilities also allow Red Hat to better orchestrate customer journeys across channels, Kolman says.
"There is the importance of the customer experience," Kolman says. "Red Hat is looking at customer journeys, mapping, and now [they] have the intelligence to understand who the customer is and how they interact with Red Hat."
Along those lines, Red Hat plans to incorporate the Genesys platform with Salesforce.com.
"The Salesforce integration is phase two, but we're planning to integrate [with Salesforce] to enhance our voice response unit and gather customer data," Congdon says.
Red Hat says it also expects to deploy the Genesys Workforce Management solution and deliver the full suite of Genesys solutions to other business units in the coming months.
Additionally, on the customer front, Congdon says Red Hat believes that Genesys' technology helps break down architectural silos.
"This will help when there is one view of the customer in a phone and voice solution and in a different silo on the service side," he says. "This [Genesys Business Edition] can help make sure that folks can get an overall view of the customer, which we certainly aspire to."
This ability comes into play with Genesys helping Red Hat to achieve one universal queue. "Now we can have one set of routing rules, one call routing management database that's global," Congdon says.
"As you can imagine, there was some complexity because we had multiple solutions," he adds. "Now, being able to pull it all together is another way of breaking down infrastructure silos."
The Genesys Business Edition platform will also provide Red Hat with seamless failover and global disaster recovery technology.
"Contact centers are mission critical, you can't afford [for] them to go down," Kolman says. "In the past, that was one of the concerns of moving to the cloud and creating an environment where you might have a failover situation, but you can eliminate that with the architecture of Genesys Business Edition."
While it's still in the early migration stage for Red Hat's switch from a completely on-premises solution to a cloud-based solution, Congdon is confident about the implementation.
"We think it fits nicely with the concept of becoming a cloud-driven IT organization," he says. "The combination of agility and flexibility as well as the potential for adding future capabilities in a nondisruptive fashion is a big win."