The quiet period is over and the transaction is complete. A stand-alone entity called Genesys launches today with what it terms “100% focus on customer experience.” However that description is too generic to capture the areas where the new company can truly differentiate itself from other contact center infrastructure providers. As we noted back in October when Permira announced its agreement with Alcatel-Lucent, the transaction removes some of the messiness that arose as the parent company pursued its efforts to provide transport infrastructure and application platforms for communications carriers. That’s a far cry from developing, installing and supporting enterprise software to support multi-channel and multimodal conversations between companies and their prospects or customers.

While the past four-and-a-half months were technically a “quiet period,” Genesys does not appear to have lost any ground in the contact center marketplace and its product development staff and efforts appear to remain intact. In the coming months, we expect to see greater visibility assigned to multi-channel initiatives around Conversation Manager and intelligent workload distribution. These are two formidable elements to a platform that supports mobile customer care, while recognizing that the same individual may use a mobile device to conduct a search, browse a vendor Web site, start making a transaction, consult with “friends” on a social network and then decide to contact an agent in a contact center.

Making sure that a customer gets in touch with “the right agent” at the right time was never a first order concern of Alcatel-Lucent. The fact that one of ALU’s most impressive demos revolved around teleconferences conducted in virtual reality (which ALU calls “Immersive Communications“) shows that the parent put “gee whiz” gimmickry ahead of supporting enterprise customers’ efforts to help their prospects or customers complete desired tasks or transactions.

Without the burden of being immersed in Alcatel-Lucent, Genesys can now pursue completion of its own desired tasks and transactions.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Genesys, customer care, Contact Centers, Mergers and Acquisitions, conversational commerce, mobile customer care