Genesys has used the acquisition path to augment its IA-infused, CX-focused cloud in two different domains.

At first blush, Genesys’s near-simultaneous acquisition of Pointillist and Exceed.ai appears a bit random. Rest assured, there is method to it. The first candidate is a six-year-old specialist in “customer journey mapping and orchestration”. The second is a five-year-old company whose principal product/service is an Intelligent Virtual Assistant (think of it as a Noodgebot) that works alongside members of sales and marketing teams to follow-up, nurture and qualify leads so humans can focus on closing deals.

Independently, the two companies would not often be recipients of the same RFPs (Requests for Proposals) when enterprises shop for cloud-based resources for contact centers. or virtual assistants. Yet Genesys has, rightfully, identified these two companies as leaders in their respective segments of a Conversation-centric approach to digital, opti-channel commerce which Genesys frames as “Experience as a Service”. In this post Barry O’Sullivan and Olivier Jouve describe their expectations for the two companies to augment internal efforts to fulfill on the promise of “Experience as a Service”.

Seeing Beyond CCaaS to Conversational Intelligence

As EVP and General Manager of Digital and AI at Genesys, O’Sullivan’s organization will be the home of Exceed.ai’s team. Pointillist’s personnel, software and solutions will integrate with Jouve’s operations as EVP and General Manager of Genesys Cloud CX. Pointillist complements Cloud CX by offering a set of services that aggregate, normalize, and visually present customer journeys in a way that helps managers measure the effectiveness of conversations and act on the insights they provide. Because it lives outside the formal contact center, it looks at “the whole conversation” (using Jouve’s term) and addresses customer experience across digital and voice channels.

Exceed.ai, by contrast, addresses a more pragmatic objective: closing sales. Like Pointillist, it does a great job of listening to customers, but it’s principal offering is a virtual assistant that is able to schedule more meetings by using human-like, personalized responses and follow-ups over Email, Web Chat and SMS. Combined the two companies address existing key performance indicators (KPIs) like web sales, repeat sales, return rate, paid media impact, and customer lifetime value. It is sales acceleration “at scale.”

Pointillist, however, focuses on optimizing each customer’s journey “at scale” by monitoring, reporting and striving to improve customer effort and other important KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Exceed.ai renders itself as a virtual assitant for sales personnel. It listens in on sales conversations and uses Natural Language Understanding to recognize the best prospects, identify commitements that have been made, accelerate follow up contacts and, ideally, speed the journey to a check-out.

What the two companies have in common is a reliance on “Conversational Intelligence.” These are the insights gleaned from the content of conversations between brands and customers, as well as metadata  associated with that content. Pointillist’s solutions span aggregation, analysis and action based on connecting the dots between the content of multiple touchpoints between brands and their customers. They use elements of machine learning and  “AI” to optimize those journeys.

And Then There’s the TAM (Total Addressable Market) Story

Years from now, when we look back on CCaaS, UCaaS and CPaaS discussions as we entered the 2020s, we will realize that solution providers often made decisions based on expanding the “Total Available Market” for their solution stack. Genesys’s acquisitions leverage the company’s vision of “Experience as a Service” by moving outside the confines contact center. It is not a cynical play for more TAM and more money because there is a pragmatic rationale for augmenting the Cloud CX core.

“Journeys” may or may not be the way to characterize the asynchronous conversations that take place over multiple channels between brands and their customers. “Orchestrating customer journeys” has all the appeal of herding cats. Customer Experience transcends the Contact Center. Olivier Jouve, whose group will be in charge of assimilating Pointillist into the Cloud CX, acknowledged that CX exists far beyond the contact center. Pointillist enables Genesys customers to look at the whole conversation. CCaaS may be critical, but the opportunities to improve customer experience across time and multiple channels is really large.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants