Genesys & ServiceNow Pledge to Deliver a Unified Platform for CCaaS & CSM

Genesys and ServiceNow have announced that their two hallmark customer experience platforms will soon become one.

Indeed, the two companies will integrate the Genesys Cloud and ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) platforms.

By doing so, they will develop a single solution: Unified Experience from Genesys and ServiceNow.

That solution will pull Genesys’s contact center, journey orchestration, and workforce engagement management (WEM) capabilities into ServiceNow CSM.

Moreover, it promises to unify customer service teams through one workspace, centralize routing, and break down silos within the agent experience.

It won’t take long for that promise to become reality, either, as the Unified Experience from Genesys and ServiceNow offering becomes available later this year.

Celebrating the news during ServiceNow’s annual Knowledge 2024 event, Olivier Jouve, Chief Product Officer at Genesys, stated:

“Earning customer loyalty requires organizations to scale personalized, end-to-end experiences. This is possible with an AI-powered solution that connects data, systems, employees, and communication channels to create a 360-degree view of the customer experience.

“By partnering with ServiceNow, Genesys is advancing its Experience as a Service vision, making it easier for organizations to connect and orchestrate data across systems.

Through a native integration between Genesys Cloud and ServiceNow Customer Service Management, organizations can break down silos, improve employee collaboration and productivity, and deepen their customer relationships.

To break down those silos, agents will have access to one shared workspace within ServiceNow CSM.

There, reps may handle omnichannel customer queries, leverage the latest assistive AI, and manage their schedules.

Meanwhile, managers may orchestrate customer and agent journeys with end-to-end interaction and work routing across channels, systems, and live/virtual agents.

ServiceNow’s AI platform will underpin these journeys, connecting the front-, middle-, and back-offices through workflow automation.

That prospect excites Rebecca Wettemann, CEO and Principal Analyst at Valoir. She stated:

The collaboration is a significant step toward delivering on the entire end-to-end customer journey by connecting front-office interactions to back-office processes, allowing businesses to streamline service operations, lower costs, and reduce customer effort.

Moreover, with the solution, managers may visualize, measure, and track the performance of customer journeys with real-time insights.

They’ll also – via Genesys WEM – gain real-time agent and scheduling performance insights, which may influence their performance management and staffing strategies, respectively.

Yet, perhaps most crucially, organizations may centralize all this critical service experience data – from a customer’s conversation history to agent performance insights – in one location.

As such, contact centers can create a unified data fabric to support customer service teams – alongside the AI models that many will likely implement in the near future.

Genesys Co-Innovates with Prominent CRM Providers

The announcement follows up the 2023 release of the CX Cloud from Genesys and Salesforce.

That release has many parallels, with Genesys pulling many of its lauded CCaaS tools into the Service Cloud environment.

At the time, Genesys – in coordination with Salesforce – conducted significant research into how it could augment the CRM with its best-in-class features.

The CCaaS Magic Quadrant leader likely took a similar approach with ServiceNow, as it aims to not only develop tighter connections with the leading CX platforms but co-innovate with the providers.

That offers Genesys a chance to differentiate and is a crucial part of the Experience as a Service vision, which Jouve mentioned.

The vision comes as CRM and customer engagement platform providers close the gap with CCaaS platforms – offering telephony, agent-assist applications, WEM, and more.

As that trend accelerates, CRM vendors may pose a threat to pureplay CCaaS providers.

Indeed, some would argue that they already do so in the midmarket and SMB space.

2023 Metrigy research underlines this, finding that 55 percent of IT and CX leaders think CRM will replace contact center platforms by 2028.

While many may dispute this, Genesys is perhaps getting ahead of the emerging trend by augmenting CRM solutions with its tried-and-tested solutions.

These solutions may give more businesses confidence in giving the CRM center stage within contact center deployments.

That would signal quite a change in the customer experience tech mix – and ServiceNow is one vendor that could benefit from the transition.

Indeed, this deal with the CCaaS leader underlines its potential in the contact center space.

As John Ball, SVP & GM of Customer and Industry Workflows at ServiceNow, stated:

Together with Genesys, ServiceNow is defining a new era of customer service.

“Bringing together the deep expertise of Genesys in experience orchestration with ServiceNow Customer Service Management offers organizations a turnkey, intelligent solution that connects customer engagement with middle- and back-office operations.”

Lastly, by marrying the solutions in this way, both vendors can expand the definition of what they do without trying to force new growth levers that disillusion customers.