Genesys Innovates with Salesforce and ServiceNow, Leads a New Era of CCaaS-CRM Convergence

At Xperience 24, Genesys and ServiceNow announced a joint offering, which will become generally available later this year.

The Unified Experience from Genesys and ServiceNow platform promises to pull the former’s voice, journey orchestration, and workforce engagement management (WEM) capabilities into the ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) solution.

In this sense, it’s similar to the CX Cloud from Genesys and Salesforce, which launched in 2023.

These offerings aren’t just closer integrations. Instead, they mark a shift from CCaaS and CRM providers “working together” to acting almost as a single entity.

Indeed, Genesys set up cross-company co-innovation teams to bring both platforms to life.

These co-innovation teams have developed a unified data fabric, a shared no-code orchestration engine, and a single desktop experience within both Salesforce Service Cloud and ServiceNow CSM.

Moreover, the joint platforms include synchronized bots and channels. Meanwhile, end-users may pull other AI use cases from both vendors into their chosen solution a la carte.

Simon Harrison, Founder & CEO of Actionary, suggested during a recent episode of the Big CX Update, that’s an altogether winning proposition. He said:

The sum of the parts here is greater than just bringing these two technologies together. It creates more of an ecosystem that better supports agent and customer experiences.

Interestingly, it also allows Salesforce and ServiceNow to close the gap between their CRM platforms and premium CCaaS offerings.

While that may be good news for customers, it perhaps raises some tricky questions about the future of the CCaaS space.

The Future of CCaaS

CRM platform providers are encroaching on the CCaaS space by adding channel routing, agent-assist, and many more core contact center tools to their offerings.

That trend may worry many CCaaS vendors, as Harrison noted:

Look at CRM and customer engagement center solutions. If a CCaaS vendor goes in to pitch to a customer after one of these guys, the customer will be asking, “Where’s the rest of it?

That said, the trend is unlikely to make CCaaS platform providers obsolete. After all, CRM vendors like Salesforce and ServiceNow are unlikely to revel in the burden of building out that all-important voice global voice network infrastructure.

Indeed, their license margins are healthy. Adding the cost and complexity of supplying a voice capability will reduce those significantly.

Moreover, CRM vendors understand the risk that if they acquire a CCaaS vendor, they make an enemy of all the others.

As such, it’s unlikely that CRM will swallow up CCaaS providers. Although, some may argue that CCaaS could become marginalized into the field of voice plumbing and plug-ins.

Yet, according to Harrison, CCaaS providers have long been wary of this threat – and that’s a significant reason why they’re moving further into the realms of WEM, journey orchestration, and conversational AI: they’re building out the value of what a CCaaS platform does.

Now that Genesys has done so, it aims to step ahead of the CRM and CCaaS convergence trend and influence its direction on its own terms. As Harrison summarized:

This is a smart move for Genesys in particular.

As Genesys continues along this path and perhaps chooses to co-innovate with other CRM leaders, expect to come across the term “XaaS” a lot more.

The acronym stands for experience as a service (XaaS), and – as Genesys bridges the gap with CRM platforms – it will likely use this to underline how it is converging the CX ecosystem.

Alongside the Unified Experience from Genesys and ServiceNow, Genesys also made several other announcements at Xperience 24. For the full rundown, check out our article: Genesys Releases an Agent Copilot, Teases a Next-Gen Virtual Agent