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Genesys gets powered by InQuira

Ian Jacobs

Genesys gets powered by InQuira

At its content-packed event for industry analysts held in Menlo Park, California, Genesys gave a preview of its forthcoming OEM relationship with InQuira. Although the two companies first announced an integration partnership in June 2009, this deal puts the InQuira knowledge management tools on the Genesys product price list. The inclusion of a built-in knowledge management (KM) function will clearly help Genesys in its traditional contact center space, but the company will need to think more broadly in order to enable these new tools to drive enterprise-wide benefits, as befits its grander ambitions.

Integrated knowledge management provides a key piece of the eServices puzzle

Over the past year, Genesys has broadened its focus from the contact center market to the wider enterprise, and has also begun to home in on ancillary markets including eServices. According to Genesys' definition, eServices encompasses interactions with customers via all means other than voice. In an increasingly multi-channel world, the way in which interactions on these non-voice channels are handled has become a significant determiner of customer experience, and therefore of customer satisfaction and loyalty.

It has also exposed one of the main problems with multi-channel thinking: each channel usually gets relegated to its own silo and customers find a frustrating lack of continuity across channels. Genesys, and other smart customer service-focused technology providers, have begun to concentrate on transforming these siloed multi-channel interactions into context-aware cross-channel conversations.

KM tools can help provide the consistency required for these cross-channel conversations, given that enterprises are willing to reform their existing business processes. That caveat, however, is a significant stumbling block for most enterprises. That cross-channel conversation benefit would then be the best-case scenario of KM tools pre-integrated into a routing engine. Now that Genesys will sell its own (albeit OEMed) KM solution, it would do well not to forget the basic benefits of the technology: reduced escalation rates, faster and more effective customer interactions, higher agent job satisfaction and lower agent training costs. As Genesys' own salespeople begin to pitch the benefits of KM to its customer base and prospects, these are the types of benefits that will likely get conversations started.

Genesys has the vision to extend knowledge management into new areas

Unlike some other OEM partners Genesys has worked with in the past, InQuira brings its own strong brand to the market. This should allow Genesys to both capitalize on the InQuira name (something akin to a 'powered by InQuira' branding for the integrated offering) and also to leverage that strong brand to expand its footprint into new spaces.

InQuira has already created a strong enterprise-focused message for its tools, pitching its ability to connect contact center agents to the collective wisdom resident in the enterprise. With a little bit of vision, this could gel perfectly with Genesys' growing practice around its Intelligent Workload Distribution (iWD) tool which allows automation and routing of business processes across an enterprise. With iWD, Genesys has taken contact center technologies, concepts and best practices and applied them to the core process of the larger enterprise. KM, if tightly integrated into this iWD framework, could become another contact center technology with applicability to broader processes.

This OEM agreement also significantly advances Genesys' capabilities in social media-driven customer service. Genesys has been working with partners such as Lithium to help understand and respond to customer interaction opportunities on social networks and web-based forums. With a tightly integrated KM solution, Genesys should now concentrate on helping customers not just respond to interactions via social networks, but also to improve their corporate knowledge bases with the lessons derived from those interactions. Given Genesys' recent burgeoning interest in social networking as a means to enhance customer intimacy, Ovum is confident that the company will move towards making KM a major part of its social media strategy going forward.

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