NASHVILLE — At its CX18 conference this week, Genesys introduced Predictive Routing, an artificial intelligence–powered routing engine, and outlined a Blended AI customer experience (CX) strategy that sees AI technologies and humans working together to improve the customer experience.
“Predictive Routing [is]…about understanding, predicting, and creating perfect conditions for you and your employees to interact with your customers,” said Genesys president Tom Eggemeier during the Wednesday keynote, adding that it “applies machine learning, actually deep machine learning…to routing.”
“A lot of you have thousands and thousands of rules about how you perfect your routing,” he continued. “We believe predictive routing can make it simpler and more effective for what you’re trying to do with your business outcomes.”
Predictive Routing uses AI to build models from aggregated customer profiles based on factors such as preferred communication channel, products purchased, and previous service requests. These models combine with employee profiles—which detail tenure, knowledge, skills, interaction history, and business outcome data—to predict the best match between customer and employee to achieve the desired result. Additionally, customer and employee data models are continuously updated, with an eye on improving future experiences.
Predictive Routing works across voice, text, webchat, and social media and is now available for Genesys PureEngage, with the company planning to roll it out to its PureConnect and PureCloud platforms later this year.
Peter Graf, chief product officer at Genesys, elaborated on the key elements of Predictive Routing in a one-on-one session with CRM magazine. “What predictive routing does is it allows an organization to optimize specific business outcomes, and it’s an AI algorithm that means it learns and it becomes better all the time,” he said. “You can optimize for higher customer satisfaction like [Net Promoter Scores] or increased employee efficiency. You can measure average handling time of an agent or you can optimize for better collections or better revenue—you can look at how much did we transact. Whatever your choice is, the algorithm will maximize that dimension. So it’s not that it does all of these things at the same time, what you do is, you pick one and the algorithm optimizes around it.”
The release of the AI-powered routing engine comes as part of Genesys’s Blended AI strategy, which Genesys CEO Paul Segre touted in his Wednesday keynote. “We profoundly believe that the best approach with AI is not to have complete automation, but to have a blended approach. We blend AI with the human touch to optimize the experiences that your customers are having. We find this gets much better results.”
Segre said that the company’s vision is set by consumers, employees, and Genesys’s business customers. “The consumers want a great customer experience, and we firmly believe that the best CX happens when moments are connected with fast, efficient, and intuitive experiences,” he said of consumers. “It should be easy [for them]; they should engage with you and get what they want without thinking about it, and do it in the channel of their choosing, which, by the way, will be different for every consumer and even be different for the same consumer depending on the time of day and the circumstance.”
With regard to employees, he noted that their jobs become more difficult as new technologies handle simpler tasks. “As automation increasingly does all of the easy things, what’s left is the hard things, and not only are they left with the hard things, but we’re asking them in this omnichannel world to blend and use multiple contact techniques and sometimes use multiple ones simultaneously,” he said, adding that “how they feel about their job, they will transmit through that chat or through that phone call, so you want to give them the tools they need to do a great job, but you also want to give them the tools that they need to be relaxed and have confidence and project the brand image that you want to project.”
“The last big constituent of our vision is our customers and the need to drive great business outcomes; the need to increase revenue, the need to lower cost, and the need to do both of those things while simultaneously improving their brand,” he said of Genesys’s customers.