The Hindu Business Line : Genesys plans to integrate contact centres and Web

Recently in Melbourne Corporates will gain enormously by integrating the Web with their contact centres. Currently their Web sites are an untapped opportunity, and facilities such as e-mail, SMS and Web chat are not being leveraged to their advantage. This was the view of officials at Genesys Communications Laboratories, at the recent `G-Force Asia Pacific’ conference in Melbourne.

Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company that provides contact centre software and solutions, aims to establish ‘Dynamic Contact Centres,’ through which companies can interact with their customers through multiple communication channels such as the Internet, e-mail, SMS, as well through the traditional voice-based contact centre.

Apart from the call centre, there are several departments of a company which deal with the customer such as the back office, or the marketing and accounts departments, said Mr Wes Hayden, CEO of Genesys. Corporates should link their contact centre to all these departments to provide for a single multi-channel service to the relationship between the company and the customer, he said.

(For example, a customer browsing a company’s Web site can have one of its products demonstrated to him by a company’s sales agent on a video Wweb chat. If he is perhaps on the move a little later, he can follow it up by SMS or e-mail, or through the company’s traditional call centre voice service).

Year 2008 will be the major inflection point for integration of the Web and the contact centre, according to Mr. Steve Rutledge, Vice President, Product and Solutions Marketing of Genesys Communications Laboratories.

IP as change agent

The key technology critical to success going forward will be IP (internet protocol) which will completely change the contact centre experience, said Mr. Hayden. “The time is right” for implementing IP in core infrastructure in contact centres, and this is an important technology for Genesys, he said.

The Internet is driving change, said Mr Jason Stirling, Australasia Vice-President at Genesys. And it is the banking sector which is investing heavily in more evolved models and able to offer differential customer services. ANZ and National Australia Bank are matching customer queries to agent skills (when the right calls will go to those call centre agents who have the skills to handle that query). The Australian government is moving to a multi-channel contact centre to handle the avalanche of call storms that happen at certain times of the year. This is able to route simple calls and complex calls to the right channels, he said.