Genesys and Salesforce Announce a Joint Platform for CCaaS and CRM

The vendors will combine their CCaaS and CRM capabilities onto a single, jointly-released platform

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Genesys and Salesforce Announce a Joint Platform for CCaaS and CRM
Contact CentreCRMLatest News

Published: September 6, 2023

Charlie Mitchell

Genesys and Salesforce have teamed up to announce a new solution: CX Cloud from Genesys and Salesforce.

The solution embeds contact center, journey orchestration, and workforce engagement management (WEM) features from Genesys Cloud CX into Salesforce Service Cloud.

In bringing these features to Service Cloud, Genesys aims to allow organizations to better understand customer conversations, behaviors, and other significant events across their journeys.

Doubling down on this aim, Olivier Jouve, Chief Product Officer at Genesys, stated: “To build the experiences customers and employees want today, businesses need to link their data, AI, and systems of engagement across their technology ecosystem.

Genesys and Salesforce are strongly positioned to enable joint customers to define the next generation of experience orchestration fueled by enriched insights and AI capabilities resulting from our platforms working in sync.

In combining CCaaS and CRM data into one platform, the vendors also hope to better power the new wave of AI solutions sweeping across the customer service space.

Those AI solutions include virtual agents, agent-assist tools, and all the latest GenAI-driven innovations touching the contact center market.

The potential of the CX Cloud from Genesys and Salesforce to power the next generation of these tools brings to mind a recent quote from Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce:

This AI revolution is really a data revolution.

Yet, alongside fueling future AI innovations, there are many more possible benefits from better synchronized CCaaS and CRM data.

More contextualized customer conversations, deeper analytics and reporting, and greater personalization across the customer experience are some of those that Genesys puts forward.

Fusing Genesys CCaaS and Salesforce CRM

The new platform promises to give end-users the flexibility to fuse data, bots, and channels from Genesys Cloud CX and Salesforce Service Cloud.

Also, by leveraging the experience orchestration capabilities of Genesys’s CCaaS platform, IT and business partners can co-create service experiences that leverage both vendor’s tools.

All that without code is the promise, making it easier for clients to pick and choose the preferred features for their platforms. That includes all the advanced aspects of Service Cloud, including Einstein AI.

Ryan Nichols, SVP of Service Cloud Product Management at Salesforce, emphasizes this, stating:

The new CX Cloud from Genesys and Salesforce will empower agents to leverage Einstein AI insights within the flow of work in Service Cloud. [That] deepen[s] customer relationships through personalized interactions, helping to drive repeat business and make positive impacts on their company’s bottom line.

On top of all this, the platform also promises to unify AI-powered employee experiences.

For instance, Genesys’s WEM solutions will sit inside Service Cloud’s employee activity dashboards – benefiting agents and supervisors alike.

That unified, interactive view aims to support contact center leaders, helping them better “manage and empower” their workforce.

Indeed, from it, they can leverage workforce management (WFM), quality assurance (QA), gamification, and many more tools.

Yet, despite the breadth and depth of all this innovation, Alan Webber, Program Vice President for Digital Platform Ecosystems at IDC, summarizes that this is – first and foremost – a data play.

“The value of a company is increasingly tied to its data and how they apply it,” he concludes. “To drive higher value from data in an efficient and effective way, businesses must have a cloud-based digital platform and ecosystem of technologies where data provides the cornerstone of the architecture to fuel intelligence, orchestration, and business processes applications.

With its unified data fabric, the solution from Salesforce and Genesys is laying a critical foundation businesses will require to succeed in the future.

Businesses can check out the platform later this year when it’s touted to go live on the Salesforce AppExchange and the Genesys AppFoundry Marketplace.

Is Co-Innovation Between CCaaS and CRM Vendors the Future?

Genesys and Salesforce have a ten-year strategic partnership.

Yet, this announcement takes their relationship to a whole new stratosphere and may spark the beginning of closer partnerships and co-innovation between other prominent CCaaS and CRM providers.

That follows the trend of CRM vendors drifting into the contact center space. Some – including Salesforce – now even offer a voice channel, agent desktops, knowledge management solutions, and other tools that traditionally fall under the CCaaS category.

That trend gave rise to an interesting conversation; will the CRM space swallow up CCaaS?

According to 2022 Metrigy research, 55 percent of IT and CX leaders think CRM will replace contact center platforms within five years.

However, at this stage, many lack the reliability and advanced feature sets of market leaders.

As such, CRM vendors don’t often challenge stalwart CCaaS leaders for big enterprise contracts despite seizing a share of the SMB space.

Yet, instead of competing with CCaaS brands, CRM leaders can shortcut their way to securing more contact center success through co-innovation.

Moreover, CCaaS companies can stamp their authority on the space, improve their data strategies, and ensure customers achieve greater success with their AI innovations.

In this sense, the CX Cloud from Genesys and Salesforce platform seems a win-win for both brands and – most crucially – their joint customers.

For a deeper dive, check out our article: The CX Cloud from Genesys and Salesforce Is a Gamechanger. Here’s Why

 

 

Artificial IntelligenceCCaaSCRM

Brands mentioned in this article.

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