AI and cloud to drive the future of CX with data-driven insights for proactive, predictive and highly personalized experiences.
Customer experience (CX) is often the deciding factor leading to a missed sale, a one-off purchase, or the creation of a lifelong customer.
Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud technologies, Genesys develops CX solutions tailored specifically to address this challenge, helping brands to effectively connect with their customers.
Genesys currently powers more than 25 billion of the world’s customer experiences each year, and counts more than half of 2018’s global top 100 brands under its portfolio. DigiconAsia speaks with Tony Bates, CEO of Genesys, for his perspective on CX in the digital economy.
In your opinion, what are the key developments in digital technology that have the most impact on customer experience?
Bates: Digital technology is a vast area. In the customer experience realm, businesses must give consumers choice and flexibility to interact with a brand how and when they want to – and today, digital communication channels are a huge part of that. With the explosion of digital channels, the challenge for businesses is to tie each interaction together to deliver a seamless journey – whether it started on a webchat, moved to the businesses app and ended with an exchange on a messaging app.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the key to doing this. By leveraging AI, businesses can fuse this interaction data and deliver proactive, predictive and highly personalized customer experiences, achieving optimal outcomes. This creates a powerful differentiator for customer experience efforts.
With only 41% of companies across the Asia Pacific leveraging AI capabilities, we foresee significant growth potential for the technology in line with rapid digitalization of the region’s economy. Countries such as Singapore are making strides to capitalize on AI technology, having introduced the AI Governance framework to provide detailed guidance for organizations seeking to leverage it.
How is the pervasive use and influence of the cloud in businesses today transforming the way customer experience should be approached?
Bates: Cloud technology ranks high on the agenda of corporate boardrooms today largely due to its ability to equip organizations with the agility necessary to succeed in today’s fast-moving business environment.
The use of cloud allows organizations to swiftly deploy new innovations in an efficient and cost-conscious manner. When implemented in tandem with AI and machine learning, organizations are able to take advantage of data-driven insights on a large scale. This is the very reason why cloud plays a pivotal role for Genesys today, where our cloud platform and AI capabilities serve as enablers for our customers to deliver impactful and more personalized customer experiences.
For instance, Genesys Cloud, built on 30 years of innovation, is designed to allow businesses to consume the latest innovations in AI, digital channels and customer and employee experience. With the platform’s open APIs, powerful orchestration and built-in integrations, businesses can seamlessly connect data, processes and systems for a unified customer experience.
Our customers in the Asia Pacific have demonstrated a demand for cloud solutions alongside AI-driven CX capabilities. Our new customers are opting for cloud solutions. In the near to medium term, we anticipate that cloud will become a business necessity, and no longer just an option.
With widespread transformation taking place in the digital economy, how do you see emerging tech innovations accelerating the evolution of CX technology?
Bates: Discussions taking place today are largely around how AI can be used to make things more efficient, or how it can automate certain processes. AI can also tie data together from interactions across the entirety of a customer’s journey into actionable insights.
I think about how AI can be used to understand all those different interactions and help optimize the outcome for the end customer. Today’s customers want to feel like they have a relationship with a brand that’s built just for them – one that’s personal. AI plays a huge role in that, but it does have to be blended across all the different interactions, even across all the different types of software applications you have in the company.
Genesys AI offers one platform and one shared data model that makes it possible for multiple AI applications to work together harmoniously in real-time, from marketing to sales to service. By leveraging all relevant data throughout the customer’s entire journey, you can orchestrate, measure and optimize processes at every touchpoint. This is a game-changer for our customers, enabling them to achieve 40-60% faster time to value.
What should organizations put in place to future-proof their capabilities in the digital transformation journey in general, and the CX journey in particular?
Bates: The first step in any digital transformation journey for modern organizations is to put in place the architecture necessary to support the continued implementation of new technologies as they are introduced. Without a proper foundation in place, organizations will inevitably face challenges in the move from legacy to innovative solutions.
This is no different for organizations wishing to enhance their CX capabilities. Putting in place a baseline cloud architecture allows business leaders to swiftly capitalize upon and deploy new innovations across the entirety of the organization, providing the agility and velocity required to succeed. With speed and accuracy being the key to positive customer experiences, Genesys sees the future of CX being encapsulated within AI and cloud.
