G-Force Brings the Magic of Next Gen CX

Last week’s global customer conference Genesys G-Force 2015 marked a rare opportunity to engage all in one place with some of the leading innovators in the customer experience industry. From our Customer Innovation Award Winners, to on-stage participants like Marks & Spencer, Microsoft, Plated, RedHat, Tangerine Bank, IBM, and Walgreens, organizations are achieving stunning business results with Genesys.

Gathering in Miami gave us a chance to hear how things are going, where we can do better, and share what we’re excited about going forward. I’m personally inspired about what I heard, what I learned, and the networking I saw happen. The event served as personal motivation about the opportunity we all have to be part of the massive shift happening as mobile, social, analytics and the cloud bring disruptive new opportunities for organizations to adopt new forms of customer engagement.

Genesys is celebrating its 25^th anniversary this year. While we are radically different than we were at inception in terms of our legacy telco focus, corporate ownership and product suite, our core commitment remains unchanged. We understand how people engage with brands and governments and how we can help that experience be better. At a G-Force panel, Troy Mills, VP Customer Care Operations of Walgreens recalled the roots of the Walgreens brand promise, which goes back nearly 100 years. When a customer called to order a prescription, being able to deliver it to the person before he or she even got off the phone with the Walgreens pharmacist was the goal. Imagine a bar being set so high for a customer experience nearly a century ago – and what that same intent means today. That’s the magic of G-Force, and the thrill of our industry, where the old adage “it’s the customer, stupid” meets the knife edge of innovation.

While the Walgreens story illustrates an intent that shaped that company’s business processes, admittedly impressive for the times and even more interesting today, by comparison, today’s stories can be much more complex. We’ve seen mere glimmers of a device explosion that will continue, expanding the number of ways customers want to engage and what they expect. Customer experience staffs require a simple way to manage this engagement within and during the customer journey. This approach requires sophisticated tools behind the scenes to make that simplicity seamless on both sides. Moreover, it requires a commitment from the c-suite to approach customer engagement in a fundamentally new way, leveraging an omnichannel engagement center approach, which was a key message from the event.

Also last week, our AppFoundry announcement highlighted just one of the ways we’re helping support the ability to manage traditional and new channels to and from customers, with a single customer experience platform. By providing an open, deep and broad foundation that we build, maintain and innovate, and extending it to key partners, we offer the market a vast array of choice and expertise to deliver CX innovation and partnership.  Many of these partners sponsored Genesys G-Force 2015 (including Platinum sponsors Microsoft and IBM) – and complemented the event with workshops, passionate demo battles, breakout sessions and innovative ideas, and discussions for how we can better serve the market together.

As we’ve seen already in 2015, the explosion of devices tied to the Internet of Things is telling when it comes to how out-of-the-box we must continue to be when it comes to customer experience. Who would have dreamed 25 years ago that your refrigerator would tell the repairman it was time for maintenance? Or that a customer would buy something with a watch? Every company is different. We’re looking not only to map the best customer experience outcome, but also to understand the path to get there in a collaborative way. So, a quarter of a century into the Genesys journey, we’re as ambitious as ever about fulfilling our mission for organizations of all sizes, to power the world’s best customer experiences.

If you were able to make it to Miami, thanks again for joining us. If you weren’t, thanks for being part of the Genesys ecosystem that’s supporting more than 100 million customer transactions per day and leading the charge in a rapidly transforming industry. In the words of our closing guest speaker, world-class boxing legend Sugar Ray Leonard, “During training rounds, when my legs started to burn, I didn’t quit. I added more rounds.” We’ve got the fortitude to go more rounds, too, and to be your biggest supporters with the best technology, services and partners to help you delight your customers.