Genesys debuts customer service GenAI, journey management
Today, Genesys took the wraps off some long-awaited journey management features and previewed a bevy of others to come to its contact center platform — including some powered by generative AI — for its Genesys Cloud customers.
Available now are Genesys Copilot for contact center agents, generative AI tools designed to help agents more quickly find answers to customer problems in product knowledge bases, efficiently summarized. Copilot can generate after-call summaries, which are a time sink in for human agents. Agent Copilot is the first of three role-based copilots, with ones for contact center admins and supervisors planned for release later this year.
Also available is Empathy Detection, AI models that “hear” agent empathy in digital and phone interactions. They evaluate how well customers are seen and heard in a Genesys user’s contact center. Empathy Detection can also be used to develop custom agent training that sharpens their emotional intelligence.
The Genesys Cloud features are the culmination of a five-year plan to provide users with better bots, find and improve empathy in customer service operations, and integrate modern customer journey orchestration tools into the platform.
“They said, ‘We’re not selling cloud-based contact centers; we’re selling CX, we’re selling employee experience, and we differentiate because we’re more empathetic and we do a better job of journey management for better customer experience,'” said Opus Research founder Dan Miller. “They pretty much told everybody where they were moving, and now there’s this checklist of capabilities that are enhancements included in their cloud.”
Also planned for this fall are updated virtual agents infused with GenAI. The company promises these refreshed chatbots will handle more complex customer service tasks, gather more information and respond to ambiguous customer requests better than the current version.
Genesys senior vice president of AI product Brett Weigl said that while Genesys Cloud is entirely built on AWS — and tends to gravitate toward AWS’s products and tools — large language models are advancing so quickly that Genesys is building LLM flexibility into its platform so customers can choose their LLM. Such flexibility also allows Genesys to switch the LLMs powering its built-in features.
“We release [updates] on a weekly basis anyway, but behind the scenes we’ve got a data streaming pipeline that lets us quickly vet new capabilities — so we can expand as the things grow,” Weigl said.
Some of Genesys Cloud’s sentiment analysis tools integrated into its agents and copilots came from the acquisition of social listening tool Radarr earlier this year. As Genesys natively integrates Radarr tools to its platform, customers can utilize all of them through its AppFoundry partner platform.
Pointillist journey management now native
After acquiring journey management vendor Pointillist in October 2021, Genesys has integrated some of its tech natively into Genesys Cloud.
One feature, Journey Flows, visualizes how a customer interacts with a contact center; another, Journey Analyzer, currently in limited availability, is an analytics tool that reports insights on customer behavior. Combined with user data on the Genesys Cloud, these tools can do things such as identify where service improvements can be made, pinpoint when and why customers switch from digital channels to phone or even eschew the bots altogether, and also determine what makes good workflows successful.
Also coming to Genesys Cloud — expected in the fourth quarter — is Modern Agent Workspace. Contact centers, regardless of cloud platform they use, are notorious for forcing agents to switch between apps or between postage-stamp sized frames as they move through customer interactions. Agents will be able to customize their desktops to their own needs. Generative AI, Weigl said, will also be an upgrade to the desktop and agent experience.
“The last 10 years was a lot of arguing about ‘how do I get everything that an agent needs in a single pane of glass.’ Now they have 36 little windows they need to access as they’re talking to the customer live,” Weigl said. “This really changes with a copilot mentality, where now I have a copilot alongside me for the ride giving me [information], but also I delegate [tasks] to it.”
Genesys showed these features and capabilities in conjunction with the Genesys Xperience 2024 user conference in Denver this week.
The company also showed Unified Experience from Genesys and ServiceNow, a native integration of Genesys Cloud with ServiceNow’s Customer Service Management platform.
Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.
