Welcome to the tech in 20 minutes podcast where you will meet new tech vendors and learn how they can help your business. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. Hi. I'm Max Clark, and I'm talking with Jeff Kriesian, who is the VP of channel sales for Genesys.

Jeff, thanks for joining.

Thank you, Max. Thanks for having me.

Jeff, what does Genesys do?

So so Genesys is a contact center as a service company. Genesys has been around for 25 years with over 70,000,000,000 customers using our service every year in over a 100 different countries. Genesys is recognized by all the major analysts, Gartner, Forrester, Obam, as a leader in the space. And Genesys really got its start with, the engaged platform. And that was really back in the early days of contact center when it was premise based and it would sit on top of Avaya or Cisco.

That's really you know, Genesys was really the the the brand to have, the leader in that category for a long time. And then back in 2016, Genesys acquired, Interactive Intelligence, which gave them PureConnect, very good, very feature rich hosted contact center platform, and then also, PureCloud, which has been rebranded as Genesys Cloud. What's exciting about Genesys Cloud is that it was built from the ground up in AWS using microservices architecture. So it is a very sort of a next gen cloud contact center platform, and it's really geared toward over 95% of our customers and prospects. And it's really our our primary go to market right now, and we're we're having a lot of success with it.

It's a lot of fun.

So it's pretty safe to say that many people have interacted with Genesys and didn't know they were interacting with Genesys. I mean, you call a bank or you call it airline or hotel or, you know, whatever. You know, chances are, odds are, it might be Genesys powering that platform and and the contact center that people are calling into. Yep. But so that's that's actually a good segue because a a lot of companies today will say, well, we don't really run contact centers.

We have customers call us, or we don't need a contact center platform, we have people email us. And, and that's not really, completely accurate, though. Right? I mean, what's what's the actual reality in terms of who is a contact center and needs a contact center versus who doesn't?

That's a great question. And, you're absolutely right. Contact centers are have have gone way beyond traditional voice channels. And they've they've expanded into what we call digital channels, and that includes things like chat, email, SMS, social channels. And all of these things, particularly you look at the millennial set.

I mean, I I have an 18 year old son that he uses his iPhone for everything except voice calls. And And I don't think he's alone. I think a lot of a lot of the younger generation do that. And so businesses have had to adapt. When you look at companies that have websites that engage in ecommerce that have toll free numbers, These companies all essentially have contact centers.

Right? Because that somebody's got to answer the toll free number. Somebody's got to be handling the transaction on the on the website, or the chat session on the website. So all of these things now roll up under the the the header of CX, if you will, customer experience. And businesses nowadays are finding themselves in a position where they can't just compete any longer on product and price.

The the big the new battleground for CX is the customer experience. And so the contact center now as it's as it's known, it used to be a call center, now it's a contact center because it includes those digital channels, has really become the welcome mat of most businesses. And if you if you think about it, whether you the ways the ways you interact with the business are either calling them, emailing them, going to their website and chatting with them, perhaps texting with them, or interacting with them on some social media channel. So a contact center has got to be able to answer and live in all of those different, media types. And so it's put a lot of pressure on companies to try to do that in a cost effective way, in a scalable and extensible way.

And I think that's really where the cloud has emerged as sort of the ecosystem of choice for businesses that live in that world.

It's also probably changed and blurred the lines a little bit. You know, historically, if you were a call center, you had, you know, a floor with cubicles and lots of dedicated agents answering those phones. And the and the company in theory was it was a larger enterprise and a bigger business. And as you look at what we talk about today and you say customer experience, and really we're talking about, like, do customers interact with you in some manner for sales or, you know, support, how much does it blur that line and bring that down? Are we talking about this as a platform now for mid market, SMB, smaller I mean, is this is this what you're talking about?

It it absolutely is. And one of the I think one of the big misnomers that we find ourselves educating against is that contact centers are just for big enterprise. You know, as I said, Genesys has been around 25 years, and a lot of the contact centers that use Genesys, the legacy customers that we've had over the years, were typically big, big companies, Fortune 100 type companies, big global companies. But now that you see the cloud sort of evolve as the next gen contact center plat platform, you're seeing businesses that are in the SMB and mid market space say, hey, wait a second. I can afford to do this.

And and so they can do it. And because when you when you leverage a cloud model, it's a pay as you go. It's a pay for what you use model. Right? It's consumption based model.

So you're not having to overbuy technology to account for your your peaks in demand. You can literally use what you're in, you know, in accordance with what your demand is. So it makes it a lot more affordable for for those smaller businesses that maybe don't have quite the scale of a large enterprise as far as the contact center is concerned. They can now get into it and they can leverage all the digital channels and all of the workforce management and analytics and recording and all the ancillary tools to help run their business more efficiently.

And and you're also blurring some lines into, what would be considered marketing automation. You know? Yeah. Did somebody come to our website and click a form and then do something and can we trigger actions? Can you can you expand and and tell us a little bit more about what that actually is and what that means with Genesys?

Yeah. Absolutely. So let me back up a half a step. One of the biggest expenses in a contact center aside from the real estate is the labor. And, the the cost of hiring and training agents to work and and achieve the KPIs that they need to achieve in a in a, in a contact center is very, very large.

The challenge is a lot of contact centers have antiquated technology, and so it equates to agents trying to do their job with with improper tools. And so when that happens, you know, the agent satisfaction goes way down, and thus, there's a lot of turnover. So when you have the turnover, it's it's not uncommon for some contact centers to completely churn out 80 to a 100 percent of their agents annually. So that's you think about the cost associated with that. So when you look at tools like moving the platform to the cloud and then layering in management tools, efficiency tools like a workforce engagement management platform that might include, you know, call recording and that might include quality management and scheduling, All of these tools that allow a contact center supervisor and agent to do what it is they're supposed to do and and meet and exceed the expectations that are set before them.

And then with with analytics, you can track and make sure that you're you're meeting your customer satisfaction scoring and your average handle times and your hold times. And so now all of a sudden, with a cloud contact center platform such as Genesys Cloud, you've got the instruments in front of you to be able to run a business in an efficient way and, and really make decisions, evidence based decisions based on the data that you're seeing in real time. So

I I think there's a a misconception that probably dates back in in bad experiences of, you know, the WFO and WFM, the workforce optimization and management tools, really were a way for, you know, the the overlords of the business to really, like, keep their thumbs on what was happening in the contact center and and make people's lives unpleasurable. But it's almost workforce engagement is completely different where you're talking about high cost for the business to churn and train people supporting, you know, their interactions with their customers. And it's it's it's now shifted in my perception to we wanna retain people and we want want them to be happy because we can't afford to lose them. I mean, is that is that accurate?

That's exactly right. You know, better technology equates to happier agents. And, you know, it's sort of a bit of a chicken and an egg can underwrite. If you have we believe if you have happy agents with the right tools to do the job, that's gonna translate to happier customers and better c x. It's been proven that, you know, when you have unhappy agents with improper tools, they can't do their job well.

They're not hitting the KPIs that have been set for them. And so that translates to poor experiences, with with customers. And you see that, and that that proves out in the call recordings and the and the surveys post call surveys. So

part of what Genesys does is you offer integrations to lots of different platforms, whether it was an existing CRM tool or, you know, cost proprietary interfaces with with a customer platform. And and the end result for all this is servicing data to the agent or maybe empowering the, you know, the customer to self-service as well. And then you've got, you know, some additional functionality. So, I mean, how is Genesys approaching this this idea of, you know, time to resolution or customer self-service, you know, to to change that load in that equation for staffing?

Well, I think, when yeah. You mentioned integrations. You know, one of the big ones is, you know, CRM integration. You hear that a lot. Right?

So we we integrate with with all the major CRM companies. We have, additionally, we have an app foundry with over 300 companies as part of that, many of which are one click integrations that extend the Genesys platform for our customers in the areas that, that they may they may need to go into. But, but the other the other piece of the platform I think is pretty unique to Genesys is that we have a, we have a unified communication capability to our platform. Single pane of glass, contact center, unified communications, all in one. So we're not reliant on sort of bolt on, you know, third party, integrations to provide a complete solution.

We have it all as part of the Genesys Cloud Platform. In addition to all of the integrations that we have with the CRM companies and billing systems and collection systems and and all the appfoundry comp partners that we have as well. So it is a it is a really, really, complete solution with the extensibility to really go in whatever direction the customer might need.

Now with Genesys Cloud, I mean, who becomes your ideal customer? I mean, is this an industry focus or a geography focus or a size focus? I mean, you're looking for people that are north of however many people. I mean, what does what does this look like with Genesys?

Yeah. So it's a great question. When you move to the cloud, this the the the sweet spot the the joke I always make is that it's like the Prince tennis racket. Right? The sweet spot gets real big or a Callaway Golf Club.

You know? And so, it's not uncommon for us to do, to do, an implementation for a customer that has 20 agents, but it's it's it's equally common for us to do, an implementation for a customer that has, you know, 1500 or 2000 agents or more. It becomes a much more tailored fit for what the customer is looking to do. And and it used to be that the biggest of the big, the TCO ROI, calculation was better to go premise based. But now that can't be said anymore.

Now it's, you know, when you look at the cost of maintenance and you look at the cost of all the ongoing expense associated with a premise solution, even for the biggest of customers, we're seeing them move to the cloud in droves right now. And it's just because of that, as I said, that the the cost, the efficiency, the flexibility, the scalability, all all of that has proven out, to really make a lot of sense for companies of all sizes. So that's why the sweet spot is so big.

A part of the advantage of being cloud based is now, you know, you enable a distributed workforce and work from home. I mean, are you finding so when you talk about earlier, you mentioned that the the biggest expenses for contact centers were labor and then space. Yeah. So so and then, of of course, churn. Right?

So now having to distribute it or or option for work from home, are you finding companies leveraging that to improve their cost structure and also increase their employee satisfaction and and lower their churn? I mean, what does this actually mean in in in real world?

Yeah. It means that it gives companies a lot more flexibility in terms of how they deploy their workforce. When you look at things like disaster recovery, you know, in in Atlanta, Georgia, for an example, we had a customer a number of years ago that, I spoke to personally that Atlanta is not used to getting a lot of snow. So when they do get snow, the city effectively shuts down. And you know, companies that are that have contact centers that employees are used to driving into in the morning now all of a sudden can't get to work because there's 2 inches of snow on the ground.

So to be able to work from home is important to keep the business running. You look at fast forward to right now. I mean, you look at what's happening in our world right now with coronavirus. Businesses that have a cloud solution are able to deploy their agents to work from home and continue the business running, in a in a seamless way. So, the other thing that's a a plus about a remote agent strategy that we've seen over the years is that you can attract a a a higher level talent.

Oftentimes, you know, you can get, somebody that's perhaps a mother is raising a family and she's she's got a college education, maybe a master's degree, but she's raising kids. And so she's taking time off from her career. But with a work from home capability, while the kids are in school, she might have 6 or 8 hours in a day where she doesn't have to necessarily do anything relative to the children who are at school. So now she can maybe get a part time job as a contact center representative working from home. And when you look at the the education and you look at the commitment and you look at the the level of professionalism that that person, you know, exudes, it really benefits a company to be able to take advantage of that capability.

What's the migration or onboarding process look like for a company moving into Genesys Cloud? I mean, let's say either if they have a prem solution and they're gonna move off of it or they're getting into contact center for the first time, what what should they expect?

Yeah. So it's, it's a real seamless experience. So with us, when you, when you when you sign an agreement with Genesys, our pricing is on our website by the way. And one of the other unique things to Genesys is that we have we have prepackaged offerings with respect to Genesys Cloud. So we have named solutions, we have concurrent pricing, we have hourly pricing, and and we have tiers.

We have, you know, a basic tier, we have a middle tier, we have a real comprehensive tier. So being built from the ground up in AWS using microservices architecture, it makes the implementations they can be very, very quick. We see 90% of our customers turned up within 90 days, 90 days or less, and that includes everything. And a lot of times, customer readiness is the is the long pole in the tent, you know, or or the or the telecom piece. But with Genesys Cloud, it can get stood up very, very quick.

But when you say telecom, a customer can do a a bring with your own telco and and take their existing circuits or SIP or whatever and point it to you.

Correct. They can they can bring their own or they can use ours.

So, Jeff, you mentioned, you know, named users versus a concurrent license. Can you, explain what that actually means and how I would, you know, apply that into a cost? And and and then as well, you know, what's a what's a pricing range? You know? I mean, low end to high end, what what should somebody expect when they're dealing with Genesys?

Yeah. Sure. So, the difference between named and concurrent is named really means you have 1 user per one license. Right? It's sort of a one to one ratio.

When you look at concurrent, that's typically for contact centers that do a lot of shift work where you might have 2 or 3 shifts. So you have one license and it can be used for 2 or 3 different people across the multiple shifts. As far as our pricing is concerned, we have named and concurrent. We also have hourly pricing as well. So on the low end for our basic, you know, inbound, outbound voice, IVR, data storage, API requests, that would be about $75 a month.

And then you can scale all the way up to unlimited. Every feature that we have on is available is about $140 a month. Obviously, named is a little less expensive than concurrent. And hourly is for, you know, for companies that that really need the the flexibility to be able to pay on a on an hourly basis.

You know, and circling back to something you mentioned beforehand, deployed on AWS, and and you and I believe you mentioned global. I mean, so this is a platform that can be consumed in just North America, Europe. And what is the reach that people could be interacting with Genesys and and using Genesys?

So we are in 18 AWS activity zones across the world, and we've got customers all over the globe using Genesys Cloud right now.

So, Jeff, we talk about COVID and and now the impact of COVID and coronavirus in the world. What what has Genesys done, and how are you helping customers navigate the changing waters of their businesses and operations? I mean, whether that's an existing Genesys customer or somebody looking at Genesys as a contact center platform.

Yeah. And and thanks, Max. And that's a real timely question for for what we're going through right now. One of the things I was really proud of Genesys, for doing was, you know, shortly after the stay at home orders were put in place, a lot of our customers were, you know, that were using Genesys Engage and PureConnect had challenges, you know, with social distancing and and people not being able to go into offices any longer. So we came up with a, what we call the Genesys rapid response offer, and it was geared toward our existing customers.

It was a cloud solution and it, it offered 90 days free and it would we we were standing them up in less than 48 hours so that we could, take care of our existing customers and make sure that they could take care of their customers during this time to really help handle surges in volume while keeping costs in check. Once we got our existing customers covered by way of rapid response, we we created a rapid response for new customers offer, which was 60 days free. It stood up in 48 hours as well. That offer ended April 30th, and we are in the process of revising that offer. We're looking at more of a of a next phase offer, like a ready response offer for our customers as we kinda move into the next phase of the, COVID 19 challenges that we're all dealing with.

That should be released here shortly. I don't have any official pricing on that to to announce today.

Awesome. Jeff, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thanks for joining the Tech in 20 Minutes podcast. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better.

Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. We can help you buy the right tech for your business. Visit us at clarksys.com to schedule an intro call.