Speakers at Genesys’s CX18 conference outlined the company’s upcoming product releases, which will be heavily dependent on artificial intelligence, and how messaging platforms can facilitate communication between companies and customers.
“Artificial intelligence is going to be a general purpose technology. It is going to change everything that we do,” Peter Graf, chief product officer at Genesys, said during the keynote on Thursday. He went on to discuss three solutions that the company will roll out throughout the year.
First up was Predictive Engagement from Altocloud (which the company acquired in February), which Graf described as a solution that shapes customer journeys by “answer[ing] the question, ‘When is a good moment to engage somebody?’” It works by collecting data across every touch point along the customer journey, information used by sales and marketing teams to assess whether customer journeys will be successful, and whether intervention is necessary.
“It captures the entire journey of the customer across all channels and it predicts the likelihood at which you are reaching this desired outcome,” Graf said. “If you’re deviating from it, then the humans come in; they intercept, they shape the journey, they have the conversation through a chat, through a video, or through an offer online.” This solution will be available for Genesys’s PureEngage, PureCloud, and PureConnect platforms later this year.
Next was Predictive Routing, which Genesys announced on Wednesday; it uses omnichannel and third-party data and machine learning to “essentially answer the question ‘Who is most likely the one [agent] that drives the best outcome for the company with this specific customer?’” Graf said. The solution is now available for PureEngage, and will be available for PureCloud and PureConnect later in the year.
Finally, as part of its Blended AI approach, the company will release a chatbot-cognitive IVR solution that combines natural language processing, machine learning, and directed dialogues to enable agents and AI to work together to achieve the best service outcomes. “This is truly where the blending happens. We’re maximizing self-service and we’re driving the automation in your interaction center,” Graf said. “We’re increasing Net Promoter Scores and we’re increasing your capacity at the same time.” The company plans to roll out these features later this year.
Speakers including Genesys’s vice president of innovation, Jim Kraeutler, and surprise guest Dan Servos—global head of maps, local search, and business chat for data and service partners at Apple—also addressed the potential of messaging platforms to transform the way that companies and customers interact.
“What if we could take all the great things about messaging that have made it our favorite form of communication in our personal lives to make it easier for consumers to communicate with brands,” Kraeutler told the audience during the morning keynote. “[Genesys] doesn’t own the messaging applications where consumers spend all of their time every day, so we need those brands to open up and to enable integration that enables that flow of messaging, and even more than that, we need them to invest in the capabilities and the tooling to allow all of us here to do what we do best, which is create great customer experiences.”
Servos elaborated on Apple’s perspective, particularly its Business Chat. “We had been watching this industry for quite a while in terms of the whole messaging industry in general, being able to see just in general how message app users are eclipsing even social,” Servos said. “With the business developer community, their outreach to us on a regular basis [is], ‘Apple, look, we love what you’ve done to help us get into a great position from a mobile strategy perspective with apps, but now we can only get so far in terms of penetration and engagement with our audience, with our customer base. Is there other things you can be doing natively, organically, in your operating system to help us?’”