Science & Technology 
Science and Technology
Science and Technology 
Wed, August 12, 2009
Tue, August 11, 2009
Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc., an Alcatel-Lucent company: Genesys Builds on Its Vision for Dynamic Customer Eng
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA--(Marketwire - August 12, 2009) - Major businesses throughout the Asia Pacific region gathered in Melbourne this week as Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, an Alcatel-Lucent company (Euronext Paris: ALU) (
This year Genesys partners and customers will share key breakthroughs in Dynamic Customer Engagement, which goes beyond traditional customer service strategies to dynamically create an environment for customer service to engage at critical moments for the purpose of driving business goals. Unlike traditional customer service, separated from the core of the business and too often regarded as a cost center designed to minimize overhead and quickly complete interactions, Dynamic Customer Engagement aims to identify the customer need, transactions and value and then appropriately engage the customer to transform his or her overall experience.
The most significant areas of transformation at G-Force Melbourne this year are focused on expanding the value of customer service, first by extending customer service beyond the contact centre, and second by enabling enterprises to adapt their businesses to serve consumers who interact across multiple channels.
To extend resources beyond the contact center, one of the rising innovations in the industry is Service Delivery Optimisation, in which enterprises leverage intelligent Workload Distribution (iWD) to virtualise customer service operations and improve productivity. A key challenge for many customer service operations has been 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 resources and departments of the enterprise while dynamically matching, prioritizing and managing service levels. Genesys iWD software works in concert with virtually any existing enterprise software application including ERP, CRM, workflow, business process management and homegrown legacy systems, to create a single global task list.
iWD reaches key milestones with 20 major implementations
As evidence of iWD's growing popularity, more than 20 major global enterprises have adopted and implemented Genesys iWD, and between those companies they represent a combined pool of more than 1.2 million back office, branch, field and corporate employees. The large scale of resources from iWD implementations matters because even if the pool of people is filtered to account for only the relevant customer-facing resources, the capacity and talents outside the contact center are more than 10 times the resources those same companies typically would have had available within their contact centers. This larger pool of resources enables them to more effectively manage their customer relationships.
For example, freenet, the largest independent telecoms provider in Germany, has embraced Genesys iWD to help it manage the more than 150,000 inbound inquiries it receives every week. These inquiries come through a variety of communications channels, including telephone, email, mail and fax. One of freenet's key customer service improvement goals is better prioritization, routing and distribution of work based on customer value, agent skills, workloads and revenue implications.
freenet uses Genesys iWD to automatically determine how to distribute work items to more than 600 customer service agents and back office employees. These service delivery improvements gave freenet clear and immediate returns on their customer service investments, including:
-- 30% reduction in average contact handling time -- 20% increase in overall agent and back-office employee productivity -- 25% decrease in follow-up customer support expenses and -- 15% improvement in customer satisfaction rates -- Accelerated activation process for new customers -- Increased customer retention
Leadership in an emerging category
"Genesys has been one of the leaders in connecting the dots between contact centers and the rest of the enterprise by integrating business processes, applications and next-generation communications channels to proactively manage the customer experience," said Ian Jacobs, Senior Analyst, Customer Interactions Technologies, for Datamonitor. "Contact centers have leveraged sophisticated business processes internally for some time, but companies are just beginning to apply those capabilities to the larger enterprise. Datamonitor believes a new category is emerging that incorporates process automation into the communications infrastructure -- bringing together routing technologies and methodologies initially designed for the contact center to optimize productivity and increase business responsiveness. Genesys' iWD is at the forefront of this trend."
Cross Channel Conversations and eServices also on the rise
Another key area of innovation this year is in improving cross channel conversations by integrating the web and the contact center. Until recently the web has not been as closely aligned with the contact center as many businesses would like. To address this issue, Genesys recently launched an initiative to eliminate the silos between traditional contact centers and the web by bringing together all of the key technologies needed to serve consumers across multiple channels. This initiative, the Genesys Cross Channel Conversations initiative, includes identifying the gaps in customer interaction today and providing an integrated platform to serve as the hub of these interactions. One of Genesys' key partners in Cross Channel Conversations is LivePerson, whose proactive web-engagement software is used by hundreds of enterprises to allow their customers to easily move between the web and the contact center without losing the context or intent of their transaction.
Another rising trend at G-Force Melbourne this year is an increase in the number of enterprises expanding and improving their online assistance, an increase in the use of chat and/or voice, and the use of sophisticated analytics to identify customer needs and determine the right moment to proactively engage them. Genesys completed its recently announced software integration with LivePerson and is demonstrating the LivePerson adapter, which supports proactive chat, callback, and scheduled-callback invitations to be offered to visitors on a company's web site. In order to improve the customer experience the resulting interactions are routed, delivered and managed through the Genesys Customer Interaction Management (CIM) platform.
On the web, LivePerson's rules-based engagement engine targets and engages the visitor. When the customer decides to talk to an agent, the Genesys solution matches visitors in real time with the availability of an appropriate resource, whether in the call center, back-office or store location. The joint solution offers a unified console and visitor queue, allowing agents to handle chat and telephone interactions.
G-force Melbourne is the premier event for customer service executives in Asia Pacific and held attracts companies throughout the region. For more information on G-Force Melbourne please visit[ http://www.g-forcemelbourne.com.au/2009/ ] for the full agenda.
For an in-depth discussion of iWD functionality and customer implementations, go to[ http://www.genesyslab.com/business_solutions/genesys_intelligent_workload_distribution.asp ]
About Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc.
Genesys, part of Alcatel-Lucent's Applications Software Group, is the leading provider of software to manage customer interactions over the phone, Web and mobile devices. The Genesys software suite connects customers with the right resources -- self-service, assisted-service and proactive outreach -- to fulfill customer requests, optimize customer care goals and efficiently use resources. Genesys software directs more than 100 million customer interactions every day for 4,000 companies and government agencies in 80 countries. These companies and agencies can leverage their entire organization, from the contact center to the back office, to dynamically engage with their customers. As a result, Genesys stops customer frustration, drives efficiency and accelerates business innovation.
About Alcatel-Lucent
Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris: ALU) (