Customer experience and contact center solution provider Genesys today announced it is acquiring Altocloud, a cloud-based customer journey analytics provider. Genesys aims to bolster its artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities via the acquisition, with an eye on empowering organizations to deliver a responsive, predictive, and fully contextual experience throughout the customer journey, across marketing, sales, and service.
The acquisition aims to enable businesses to score and predict a customer’s journey in real time across channels, including while they are live on a website, using a mobile app, or interacting with an employee. The AI and machine learning capabilities use predefined personas and past behavior analysis to automatically predict consumer outcomes and contextualize the customer’s journey; this in turn helps organizations deliver the next best action via the right employee.
“The field-proven Altocloud solution—used by customers across industries that include banking, insurance and retail—enables businesses to engage and intervene in a customer’s journey in real-time across channels,” says Peter Graf, chief product officer at Genesys. “This machine learning and AI-based outcome prediction capability is highly complementary to all we do on the AI front at Genesys. Using predefined personas and past behavior analysis, it automatically predicts consumer outcomes such as buying a product, registering for an event, or booking a trip. This acquisition will enable Genesys customers to get more end customers to the desired next action, whether they are visiting a website, using a mobile app, or in a conversation with an employee.”
Noting that Altocloud has been an innovator in the contact center market, Sheila McGee-Smith, founder and president of McGee-Smith Analytics, praises the acquisition. “When Barry O’Sullivan [Altocloud’s cofounder and CEO] left Cisco in 2013, he had a vision for a company that would break new ground in customer experience. Customer journey, a term being used in the world of marketing, had yet to be applied in the contact center market. Altocloud helped bring not just customer journey awareness but delivered—from the cloud—breakthrough capability to monitor and predict customer behavior on websites. Genesys does well to augment its own AI and machine learning assets with Altocloud,” McGee-Smith says.