In a provocative marketing move, Genesys has launched a “Get Your First Year Free” offer for companies looking to retire their premises-based contact centers and IVRs. The offer started on September 1, 2014 and will be available through the end of October. Genesys calls out “Avaya, Aspect, Alcatel-Lucent, Interactive Intelligence, or any qualified on-premises, legacy call center,” specifically, but any company in the U.S., Canada, UK or Ireland  25-250 contact center seats or a $5k minimum monthly revenue commitment (prior to credits), billed on a “per seat” basis, is eligible. The customers must agree to replace their existing contact centers (no “newbies”) and sign a 3 year contract for the Premier Edition of Genesys’ Virtual Contact Center. That package includes  Inbound Voice ACD, Basic IVR and CX Analytics. Other services can be subscribed to at “regular subscription rates.”

The Genesys offer acknowledges that the packaging and promotion of Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) offers has entered a new era. Every major solution or platform provider has something to offer in this category, though it goes by many different names – forever changing the marketscape. Today, contact center decisionmaking resides with a “working group” that includes Marketing, Customer Care, IT, Mobility and the elusive “Customer Experience” Officers. On the supply side, their queries or RFPs are met by Business Process Outsourcers (BPOs), System Integrators (think Accenture, IBM Global Services), traditional contact center infrastructure providers (Cisco, Avaya, Genesys, Aspect, Interactive Intelligence…) and old guard “Voice Application Service Providers” (West Interactive, FirstData, Enghouse…).

Solution providers have taken a hit to their income statements when they move from licensing sales (along with maintenance subscriptions) to a CCaaS model. These arrangements bring give rise to “deferred revenues,” making future revenue recognition predictable, at the expense of near term profits and cashflow. Genesys clearly feels that it has the financial strength to extend a generous free-trial period to lure business from its competitors, many of whom have “done the math” on the “XaaS” model and are doing their best to accommodate customers with “virtualized” and hybrid cloud offerings.

It looks like a good marketing move by Genesys and one that deserves serious evaluation by firms that have been paralyzed by the plethora of cloud-based offers.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence

Tags: customer care, Virtual Contact Center, IVR, Cloud