Genesys Unveils Dynamic Contact Centre Vision to Enable Businesses to Transform Customer Service

  • Customer Service Software Leader Delivers New Technology and Outlines Critical Steps to Elevate the Strategic Value of Contact Centres

Wokingham, February 20, 2007 - Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc., an Alcatel-Lucent company (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU), today unveiled its business and technology vision for improving the strategic role of customer service to drive business value by creating the "Dynamic Contact Centre" (DCC).

As contact centres become increasingly important corporate assets, customer service organisations must transform themselves to unified service centres that can automatically optimise customer traffic, internal resources and business outcomes. The challenge for most companies is how to balance all of these needs appropriately to simultaneously improve the customer experience, increase agent productivity and satisfaction, and drive revenue with efforts to enhance loyalty and up-sell their customers.

In defining its vision, Genesys looked at the global customer service leaders among the 4,000 companies currently using its software, including eight of the world's top 10 banks and 10 of the top 10 telecommunications firms. Genesys recognised that customers have started to deploy elements of the DCC vision today, based on key Genesys capabilities. Genesys defines a unique path forward to orchestrate all the areas of customer service automation. This recognition led to the delivery of new capabilities in Genesys 7.5 and set the path for a broader set of capabilities to be delivered over the next 18 months.
 
These key capabilities, orchestrated through Genesys' unique DCC vision, enable companies to automatically respond to changing conditions, provide a substantial improvement in overall customer service and a significant return on investment for the enterprise. According to Genesys, these critical capabilities are:

1. Consolidation and Virtualisation of Resources
Executives want to forge a single entry point for activities, but they are frustrated by the disparate customer-facing technologies and practices that make up these entities. Consolidation and virtualisation of resources unifies various contact centres - regardless of hardware platform and location - to expand and contract the resource pool to meet current traffic demands.

2. Proactive Contact Management
Leading service organisations actively engage their customers to apprise them of relevant events or changes, such as appointment reminders or delayed flight departures. Proactive contact management dynamically generates messages in multiple formats - such as SMS or e-mail - to inform customers and eliminate unnecessary inbound calls. This enables a service organisation to adjust inbound and outbound interactions based on current traffic or external events.

3. Reporting and Analytics
Dashboards and drill-down reports give at-a-glance insight into customer service activity by providing real-time and historical views of the performance metrics and changes over time. The key capability is to measure the effectiveness of current strategy and map it to specific business goals, transactions and processes.

4. Branch, Remote and Expert Integration
Sometimes the right expert for a customer call is located well beyond the contact centre in a branch or office. This key capability leverages these experts selectively. For example, higher valued clients might go to a highly skilled resource located within a branch office, rather than the general call centre.

5. Business Process Routing
Today, most contact centres do not integrate customer service to processes managed by the back office, even though a customer call may require a series of transactions, such as order fulfillment or field dispatch. Business Process Routing integrates workflow items between the back office and the contact centre. With Business Process Routing, workflow items such as forms, faxes and applications can be incorporated into contact centre activities. By integrating processes across phone, e-mail and fax, a company can improve back-office agent productivity and customer service. 

6. Customer-Centric Routing
Customer-centric routing automatically routes customers to the appropriate resource, reducing customer frustration by connecting them to the ideal resource with the right information – even if that resource is located outside the contact centre. Customer-centric routing helps increase first-call resolution rates, increase cross-sell and up-sell rates, and improve agent satisfaction.

7. Internet and Multimedia Integration
The web is not just for self-service any more. With Internet and multimedia capabilities, customers can interact with the contact centre through channels such as chat, e-mail, instant messaging, video calls and SMS, increasing customer engagement and completing more business. Across these different interaction types, customers receive a consistent experience and outcome.

8. Real-time Recommendations
Increasing customer satisfaction and contact centre revenue requires agents to make relevant offers based on real-time data such as customer requests, status and account history. As a result, they can anticipate specific customer needs at the ideal time. Real-time recommendation empowers agents with immediate information to tailor product and service recommendations based upon customer background, history and interaction type. 

9. Workforce Management and Optimisation
Workforce management and optimisation is central to running customer service organisations that simultaneously operate efficiently and satisfy customers. Organisations can forecast and schedule agents dynamically, based on traffic volumes and resources across a multi-site, multi-channel environment, and close the gaps between customer needs and agent skills.

10. Integrated Self-Service
Integrated self-service helps maintain high service level standards across every customer segment. Through touch-tone or speech-enabled applications, customers can complete service requests without having to speak to an agent. When needed, they can seamlessly transfer to assisted service and retain all customer data and transaction history.

While customer service organisations have deployed one or more of these capabilities to their advantage before, it is the unique orchestration of all of these capabilities that Genesys delivers in the Dynamic Contact Centre. To fully optimise business outcomes, the Dynamic Contact Centre leverages a solid software foundation and customer data from other third-party software and applications. As such, the Genesys suite provides the framework to support each of the 10 Dynamic Contact Centre capabilities that integrate with a wide variety of software and telephony equipment.

In looking at the marketplace, industry analysts see a very small percent of organisations have put in place the capabilities to achieve the Dynamic Contact Centre vision of customer service. Today, fewer than 15 per cent of global businesses have achieved the level customer service needed to meet more than half the metrics required to be considered a Dynamic Contact Centre, according to a recent survey of more than 25 industry analysts who specialise in tracking customer care. But analysts also expect a growing number of major initiatives from enterprises attempting to reach that milestone.

"The 'Dynamic Contact Centre' helps communicate and reinforce that contact centres should be thought of as constantly changing and growing - that the job of serving customers is never static. It can help frame discussions evaluating where a company's contact centre is today and how to define a roadmap for the future," said Sheila McGee-Smith, president and principal analyst of McGee-Smith Analytics, a leading consultant in customer service best practices.

About Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc.
Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company, is the only company that focuses 100 per cent on software to manage customer interactions over the phone, web and in e-mail. The Genesys software suite dynamically connects customers with the right resources - self-service or assisted-service - to fulfill customer requests, optimise 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 organisation, from the contact centre to the back office, to improve the overall customer experience. As a result, Genesys helps stop customer frustration, drive efficiency, and accelerate business innovation. For more information, go to www.genesyslab.com or visit the industry blog at www.betterinteractions.com

About Alcatel-Lucent
Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) provides solutions that enable service providers, enterprises and governments worldwide, to deliver voice, data and video communication services to end-users.  As a leader in fixed, mobile and converged broadband networking, IP technologies, applications, and services, Alcatel-Lucent offers the end-to-end solutions that enable compelling communications services for people at home, at work and on the move.  With operations in more than 130 countries, Alcatel-Lucent is a local partner with global reach. The company has the most experienced global services team in the industry, and one of the largest research, technology and innovation organisations in the telecommunications industry. Alcatel-Lucent achieved adjusted proforma revenues of Euro 18.3 billion in 2006 and is incorporated in France, with executive offices located in Paris. [All figures exclude impact of activities to be transferred to Thales]. For more information, visit Alcatel-Lucent on the Internet: http://www.alcatel-lucent.com

Media Contact:
Lucille Jackson, Genesys, 0118 974 7144, ljackson@genesyslab.co.uk
Duncan Burford, PR for Genesys, 01780 721 433, dburford@iba-europe.com

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