G-Force 2016: Don’t Stop Believing in Great Customer Journeys

The theme of this year’s Genesys G-Force was Journey of a Lifetime. For those who attended, it was quite a journey! We heard inspiring speakers, successful customers, and industry thought leaders. It was also a journey of song, dance, laughter, and the experience of a passing hurricane.

The G-Force journey began with Partner Day, where Genesys leaders shared strategies for accelerating business and targeting new growth opportunities. They also recognized the top partners in innovation and performance. Genesys Partner Innovation Awards highlight outstanding innovation and creative use of the Genesys Customer Experience Platform. Click here to view the complete list of the Genesys Partner Innovation Awards announced at the event.

Our main stage session opened with an amazing musical performance of visual orchestration by Cello Joe. CEO Paul Segre highlighted technology innovations of the past 25 years, describing it in parallel to the Genesys journey of success.

G-Force main stage featured a rich repertoire of global customer success stories:

• Joerg Knoop, Head, Contact Centre and Telesales Capabilities, Vodafone GmbH, walked the audience through their omnichannel customer journey story and how this transformation skyrocketed their Net Promoter Score.
• Terry Hickey, Vice President and Partner, IBM IX Canada, discussed how cognitive systems will revolutionize customer experience.
• Fabiano Dourado, Director, Customer Service, Itau Unibanco, explained how they are integrating the back office into their customer service chain to boost performance and productivity.
• Terry Gardiner, Vice President, Customer Experience Enablement, TELUS, took to the aisles to tell how their story of employee engagement and customer journey mapping resulted in industry-leading customer satisfaction.
• Johan Persson, Chief Operations Officer, Careem, educated the audience on how his ride sharing business has experienced amazing growth, providing a transportation service while fostering opportunities never available before in the Middle East.

A journey to the top of Mt. Everest was topic of the day 1 keynote speaker, Jamie Clarke, Adventrepreneur, Founder and CEO, “The Out There Adventure Centre” and LiveOutThere.com. Jamie’s energetic presentation was streamed live to viewers as part of Genesys CX Day celebration.

The hottest trend at the event was, of course, the next gen of customer experience technology. Three popular tech trends on display throughout the event were the Internet of Things (IoT), hyper-personalization engagement, and virtual reality.

• IoT was a demonstrated on main stage by Dimension Data and Joerg Fischer, Technical Vice President, Bosch Service Solutions, with a tiny washing machine and a big story of how digital technology needs a human touch to reshape customer experience (CX) in the age of IoT. Bosch also demonstrated IoT in a breakout session Internet of Things: The Disruptive Impact of IoT on Customer Experience, outlining not only how IoT will help with consumer electronics, but also retail, healthcare, and insurance industries. It will even help you find a place to park your car!
• Hyper-personalization sessions highlighted that when information and context are shared across channels, your business processes must match relevant interactions and tasks with the most appropriate and available resource.
  • In the breakout, Hyper-Personalization Changes Everything: Understanding Why Operations Will Never Be the Same Again, UPMC shared their success story about how micro-personalization helped their dedicated concierge services for Medicare Members to reach 95% first call resolution and a 97% retention rate.
  • TELUS is utilizing hyper-personalization on their employee engagement side, with new customers during their first month of service routed to the same agent.
• Virtual reality was on display—and for use—as Merijn te Booij, CMO, showed trends of IoT, big data, and hyper-personalization.  His presentation featured an amazing demonstration of how 3D reporting and analytics will be the next evolution of technology for employee engagement and business optimization. Attendees experienced a live virtual reality demo in the pavilion as well.

Speaking of fun and eye dazzling demos, this year’s partner demo battle had some very creative submissions, especially from finalists Anana LTD, Pindrop and nGUVU. Congratulations to our Gold Medal winner Anana LTD, and to People’s Choice Award winner Vidyo. Keep up the contact center creativity!

A highlight of the event is always our Customer Innovation Awards. The global award finalists were evaluated by an executive panel of judges for achieving exceptional customer experience across their industries and remarkable customer service innovation and transformation. Congratulations to the eight winners of the 2016 Genesys Customer Innovation Awards:

• The Globetrotter—Red Hat, Best global rollout of the Genesys Customer Experience Platform
• The CX Innovator—Vodafone, Best omnichannel customer success story
• The CX Pioneer—Mobily, Best new customer—breaking silos with a fast deployment
• The CX Mover—JM Bullion, Best cloud customer migration and/or deployment
• The CX Champions—Bupa, Best CX manager and team (team award)
• The CX Hero—TELUS, Celebrating call center agents of the year
• The CX Ally—Itaú, Outstanding long-term partnership with Genesys
• The CX Engager—Rabobank, Best digital engagement success story

As part of our journey of a lifetime theme, Genesys partnered with Vidyo to host the Giveback: Journey of a Lifetime contest. Each entrant proposed a personal mission to give back and change people’s lives for the better around the world. Our attendees voted and the winner is Ramon Parada. View Ramon’s story of giving back with the group Traveling Carpet in Paraguay. We’ll be checking in with Ramon this year on his give-back journey.

The approaching hurricane preempted travel plans for some who had planned to attend and forced early departures for others. While we were sad to miss some of you this year, our primary focus is always safety. Despite our Journey of a Lifetime theme, we didn’t want Hurricane Matthew to be the journey of a lifetime for any of you! We were pleased that G-Force breakout presenters who couldn’t travel to Miami showed dedication to a great event experience by presenting remotely, such as Ticketmaster, who presented via video.

For those of us at the G-Force closing session there was a magical musical moment to lift attendee’s spirits courtesy of Choir! Choir! Choir! The group, based out of Toronto, travels the world spreading song as a way to foster confidence and team rapport. The song we sang was by the aptly named band Journey and their classic anthem Don’t Stop Believing. No wind, rain, or travel delays were going to break our singing spirit!

We would be remiss without saying one final “thank you” to all our sponsors, partners, attendees, and especially our employees made this G-Force one to remember. See you all next year in Miami, October 10-12, 2017!

In the meantime, see more of the G-Force 2016 event on our Facebook album and storify page.