NTT and Genesys: Why cloud is key to customer experience
Genesys offers its customers the ability to create great customer moments for end users, as Heinrich Welter, Territory VP EMEA Central and GM DACH, explains. “We power around 70 billion interactions per year, all focused around empathy - that is our utmost aim. What we provide is the ability for agents to deliver high quality interactions across all channels.” Doing requires advanced technology, and Genesys has duly been recognised in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. “What we do is powered by the cloud. That in itself is an innovation driver, but along with that we combine emerging technologies like artificial intelligence.”
Like all industries worldwide, the sector has been to some extent upended by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. “The pandemic has required companies to think through a totally different model, one where they needed to send people home basically overnight, but still be able to provide services,” says Welter. “For most companies, customer service has become the store window of the organisation. You do not have your branches anymore, so customer service has even become more important.” Even before the pandemic, however, changes were afoot in the industry, specifically in the area of technology. “Customer experience has changed from a cost piece to a value piece,” says Welter. “Technology enables things - if you have a smiling agent and that agent is friendly, that's great. But if the agent says to you: ‘I'm really sorry, I can’t help you. You need to call this or that other function,’ then that is still not an empathetic moment.”
Genesys has a longstanding relationship with NTT, dealing with large customers and clients with NTT as a systems integrator. “What’s really important is that NTT has made the full transition into the cloud. As a systems integrator, you need to change to support cloud - because it is a different form of project. You need to be fully agile and adopt a different type of deployment methodology. NTT is creating the ecosystem required to successfully deliver cloud projects, because when it comes to the cloud, it’s about integration, bringing things together and making things work in an ecosystem - not doing everything yourself.”
That’s been especially important in the pandemic, with Genesys serving new customers who were deciding in days to go to the cloud. “With NTT, we were able to take them live after just 10 days,” affirms Welter. “So it’s a very deep collaboration on all levels, not only technology. As a supplier, you need more than tools, you need knowledge of how to use that technology, how to adopt it.”
Going forwards, Welter sees the cloud as only becoming more vital to providing good customer service, not least when combined with AI. “It really requires the cloud, because you're talking about huge amounts of data processing, with the capabilities needed only given via the cloud. That’s why we need the close collaboration we have with partners who follow the trends, such as NTT, to make sure that clients understand that.” Welter further emphasises that all this is in service of helping its customers to become as customer centric as possible. “You need to make sure that all your organisation's efforts are aligned around the customer - putting the customer in the middle and structuring everything around that.”
