Genesys, best known for its contact-centre software, is exploring the broader market of location-sensitive “geo-tracking” applications and other individual information about the user to make communication with their mobile devices more personally relevant.
The development was announced at its 10th G-Force user conference in Melbourne. It is seen as easing the company’s road into a broader market, making it easier to talk with clients’ senior management beyond the company’s traditional context of the customer support centre.
The company has experimented with location sensitivity in the context, for example, of a sporting event, broadcasting special offers on food to all “smart-phones” in the vicinity. But there is a broader context, says Genesys president Nicolas de Kouchkovsky. “I wouldn’t mind [someone who sends me a message] knowing that my preferred language is French, with English as my second preference and have them avoid wasting my time speaking to me in Spanish.”
Such tailoring of preferences, location and other personal information to make messages more relevant, works towards an emerging role of the smart-phone as a full-fledged “digital assistant”, he says.
Genesys has had meetings with two advertising agencies about the geo-tracking capability in the local region, says Jason Stirling, head of Genesys’s Asia Pacific sales and field operations.
Geo-tracking technology has been around for some time, says APAC field marketing director Ian Gardner, but now the business case for its use is starting to come together,
The company’s exploration of location-sensitivity is specifically not related to the contact centre, says APAC senior vice-president Michael McBrien. “It is a media play. It is about getting into other pieces of the organisation.”
Genesys has the advantage of having a relationship with companies at the customer service level that a telco would not have, but the new developments gives it the opportunity to broaden that.
“If we can have a conversation about this stuff above the level of the contact centre, with someone that owns the revenue. If we can talk sales and service that involves channels like smart phones and the internet, without saying the words ‘call centre’ then you’ve got their attention,” says Stirling.
— Bell flew to Melbourne courtesy of Genesys
Workload distributor ready for market
At its 10th G-Force user conference in Melbourne, Genesys, the Alcatel-Lucent subsidiary traditionally associated with contact-centre management, signalled the public readiness of its Intelligent Workload Distribution (iWD) product.
The software, which has been under evaluation by a number of clients, is intended to add flexibility to customer-service operations, by virtually combining a number of physically distinct contact-centre or CRM operations so they appear to be a single operation.
A key challenge for many customer service operations is to integrate branch offices, remote or home agents, mobile field employees and experts in the back office. With iWD software, enterprises can distribute customer service work items across all workers, providing 24-hour coverage from staff on a nine to five schedule in different parts of the world.
Genesys iWD software works with virtually any existing enterprise software application including ERP, CRM, workflow, business process management and home-grown legacy systems, to create “a single global task list”, Genesys says.
The software is being used by 20 international companies, such as freenet, the largest private telecommunications provider in Germany.
Genesys iWD will help freenet manage the more than 150,000 inquiries it receives a week.
These inquiries come through a variety of communications channels, including telephone, email, mail and fax.