Creating Dynamic Customer Experiences with PureCloud by Genesys

Customer expectations are rapidly changing due to the easy access to real-time information from any device, anywhere. In today’s fast-paced and increasingly shifting marketplace, competing in the market based on product or price alone is not enough to entice customers. What matters most--and what builds or breaks a brand’s appeal--is the customer experience. Even though the focus on the customer has been the forefront of every business, it is a continuously shifting environment that is stimulated by new technologies and new marketing ploys.   

Defined by Forrester Research as “the customers’ perception of a brand as a result of their interactions with the company,” customer experience has never been more important. It is a vital factor for helping to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy in a company. The customer experience also creates conditions that enable companies to reduce costs and enjoy higher levels of employee engagement. So how do businesses ensure a positive customer experience? Most of today’s enterprises utilize a contact center and value it as the best place to begin achieving one’s customer experience goals.

In this article, ‎Olivier Jouve, the Executive Vice President at PureCloud by Genesys, talks to VoipReview.org about what contact centers need to effectively understand and meet the needs of consumers and shares how PureCloud by Genesys™, a cloud-based, customer engagement and employee collaboration solution, is the platform organizations (regardless of industry) need to create dynamic customer experiences.

The Customer Experience Challenge

According to Jouve, the core of the customer experience (CX) is creating a satisfying, efficient journey--and what drives this journey first and foremost are the customer preferences. “The average customer now has a choice of nine channels to engage organizations, and they are overwhelmingly digital — the trending areas in 2017 are virtual assistants (chatbots), instant messaging, mobile apps, video chat, and interfaces with the Internet of Things (IoT),” said Jouve.

“This is a complex and quick-paced evolution, where change is driven not by an organization’s service strategy or IT capability, but from the outside—by fluid and fast-evolving customer channel preferences that demand digitally augmented, contextual and conversational brand interactions,” added Jouve.

In short, consumers have now taken over the driver’s seat: they are setting the agenda and have greater power in dictating which companies sink or swim depending on who can--or can’t--meet their terms. Brands that seek to succeed need to be able to focus on customer experience in order to survive and maintain leadership. So what is the first step towards achieving this? Empowering the contact center.

Jouve believes the first thing contact centers need to do to effectively understand and meet the needs of consumers is to listen. “It starts with listening,” shared Jouve. “In our customer case studies, we’ve seen time and time again what technological barriers prevent customers from providing the best service. Legacy contact centers cannot scale or process data at a rate that empowers agents to solve problems the first time. Outdated contact centers have silos that prevent a smooth journey for consumers, frustrating everyone.” Thus, to be able to listen properly and achieve one’s unique customer experience goals, businesses not only have to develop a robust strategy that delivers powerful experience but also must invest in tools and processes that today’s modern customer demands.

Transforming the Customer Experience with PureCloud by Genesys

When it comes to transforming the customer experience, Genesys, an industry-leading provider of omnichannel customer experience and contact center solutions, has a powerful approach to help deliver exceptional service. Genesys powers more than 25 billion of the world’s best customer experiences each year, and this success can be attributed to delivering solutions that empower both traditional and digital consumers. PureCloud by Genesys, in particular, is the first cloud customer engagement solution built for the future.

“It was designed new, and from the ground up, to address the spectrum of legacy and emerging digital paradigms and scale to quickly meet the customer experience and interaction demands,” said Jouve. “Uniquely, we do it by leveraging a complete microservices architecture to rapidly build and extend next-generation capabilities.”

PureCloud connects customers across phone, email, chat, web and social media, and provides businesses with the data they need to have informed and effective conversations. This drives efficiency in the contact center, enables predictive analytics, and results in the delivery of a more personalized customer experience.

Introduced at this year's Enterprise Connect 2017 trade show in Orlando, Florida, PureCloud leverages the most modern architecture to deliver an all-in-one solution to empower users to create dynamic customer experiences for both traditional and digital consumers. With PureCloud, users get:

• A true cloud architecture that provides continuous improvements
• A feature-rich solution for complete customer engagement
• Unparalleled reliability and disaster recovery
• Amazon Web Services elastic infrastructure with limitless capacity
• IP telephony services like porting existing and adding new numbers
• A modern web and mobile user experience
• Lightning-fast deployment
• Flexible subscriptions, month-to-month terms
• Scalability
• Ability to integrate with Salesforce, Zendesk, and other applications

PureCloud has enjoyed impressive growth over the last 12 months, adding more than 500 new customers, most of which are based outside North America. “There has been a 300% increase in customer use in the first half of 2017 alone,” stated Jouve. PureCloud processed about 1.6 billion API calls in the last 30 days. The breakdown of the last four weeks in API calls was 380 million, 390 million, 400 million, and 440 million. We are projecting two billion API calls in the next 30 days. The platform also offers user interfaces in 15 languages--more than any other software as a service (SaaS) customer experience cloud provider on the market. "Our PureCloud partner channel has also experienced significant growth in assisting companies by both implementing new solutions and integrating with legacy environments to leverage existing investments,” added Jouve.

How PureCloud by Genesys Benefits Various Industries

PureCloud is vertical-agnostic and continues to be a powerful tool for all industries. However, Jouve said they have experienced significant adoption in the retail, finance, and healthcare verticals. Some of their most successful customers include Quicken and PropertyGuys.com.

• Quicken - A personal finance software provider that branched off from Intuit in early 2016, Quicken uses PureCloud to deliver a superior customer experience. Quicken favored PureCloud for its fast and easy deployment, flexible month-to-month subscription terms, and continuous delivery of new functionality.
• PropertyGuys.com -  A real estate trailblazer in Canada, PropertyGuys.com sought a solution that will help optimize their contact center operations and enable their fast-growing company to become more agile despite their limited resources. PropertyGuys.com turned to PureCloud by Genesys due to the latter’s reputation for cost-effective scalability, quality guarantee, and local support presence. Since tapping PureCloud, PropertyGuys.com has enjoyed a 20% increase in sales and were able to reduce costs via more productive agents.

To learn more about PureCloud and how Genesys is helping enterprises transform the customer experience, visit Genesys website.

About Genesys

Genesys is committed to helping businesses create exceptional customer experiences for lasting relationships. A leader in omnichannel customer experience and contact center solutions, Genesys is trusted by more than 10,000 companies in 100 countries worldwide. Their Customer Experience Platform portfolio includes PureCloud by Genesys, PureConnect Powered by CIC, and PureEngage Powered by Genesys Enterprise Edition.