July 15, 2025 – Duration 00:24:22

S5. Ep.3 How Global Payments Successfully Migrated to the Cloud

When Global Payments realized that their on-premises contact center solution wasn’t providing the agility or features they needed, they began a process that ultimately led them to the cloud. On this episode of Level Up CX Tech, we’re joined by Beth Granberry from Global Payments to hear how the IT and business teams collaborated to ensure the final solution met their current — and future — needs.

Transcript

• 0:02 Greg Thomas

  Hi, I’m Greg Thomas from Genesys, and welcome to level up CX tech, where we delve into the most pressing issues, opportunities and challenges in customer experience right now, and how you can use CX technology to see real business value.

• 00:17 Michael Logan

  And I’m Michael Logan, and today we’re going to be joined by Beth Granberry of Global Payment Systems. So with that, let’s get into this week’s episode. Hey, Beth, welcome. Could you introduce yourself for our listeners?

• 00:28 Beth Granberry

  I sure will thank you. Yes. I am glad to be here. Thank you for having me. I’m Beth Granberry. I work for Global Payments. We are literally a global, worldwide, global payment company, and we process payments for banks, for merchants. We do credit card purchases, we do point of sale purchases. And I’ve been with the company 27 years, so it’s been a long way through a couple of acquisitions, but I’m glad to be here.

• 01:05 Greg Thomas

  Yeah, could you just tell us a little bit about your role, and then we’ll kind of dive into your journey there at Global Payments?

• 01:14 Beth Granberry

  Certainly. So my role over the 27 years, of course, has transitioned from one facet to another, and where I am right now is really a place I love and where a lot of peers would love to be, and that is focusing on strategy and innovation. Strategy and Innovation is near and dear to my heart. I get to look at what’s on the market, understand the marketplace, I get to see what innovation is there and how it can benefit our customers, how it can benefit our company, and then also look into our own ecosystem of networking and tools and see how it would fit in that ecosystem. So looking at all the new technology allows me to really align with what our business units are asking for. They’re looking for CX. They’re looking for the voice of the customer. They’re looking for journey management. And so once they say, this is where we want to go, my role literally sits beside the business, sits beside our customer experience team, and we map out what technology we want to utilize and what platform we want to put it on.

• 02:41 Michael Logan

  Beth, tell us a little bit about Global Payments’ journey and their migration from legacy solutions to a cloud solution. What were some of the drivers behind that? What were the things that were really important to you, and how did you see the light to move forward?

• 02:59 Beth Granberry

  The movement from where we were with a voice legacy platform to the cloud—working with digital voice media routing—was a huge change. We knew that cloud was going to change not only how we processed calls, but how we looked at the entire platform altogether. We had an internal boot camp that our DevOps team was doing to reformulate our developers and move them into using more cloud native tools. As a participant and teacher of that, we learned about DevOps, agile, Scrum, and all of the development tools we’d need. When we began looking at vendors, my first question was whether they had cloud-native code. If they didn’t, we didn’t consider them. We needed microservices-level flexibility to achieve our digital and voice goals.

• 04:44 Greg Thomas

  Beth, this boot camp, I think, is fascinating. The fact that Global Payments invested in looking at where the industry is going—can you talk more about that boot camp experience?

• 05:00 Beth Granberry

  Absolutely. It was a corporate-wide initiative. As our company moved to cloud from a processing perspective, we knew we had to retrain our developers. We embraced DevOps, Scrum, and MVPs. After 20 years focused on voice, I transitioned into the Cloud Business Office, which ran these boot camps. We trained on Agile principles and DevOps tools like Terraform, GitHub, Jenkins, Docker—you name it. I didn’t teach those, but I helped others understand how to apply them. Later, when I returned to the telephony side, I realized we could apply all this to voice. And now, with Genesys, we build chat solutions using Agile principles. It’s not formal Scrum, but we’re delivering MVPs fast and effectively. It’s helping the business deliver customer experiences quickly—wherever the customer is.

• 07:57 Michael Logan

  Let me follow up on that. I think the idea of having the boot camp was brilliant because it set you up in so many ways for success when you did move to the cloud. With all the knowledge from the boot camp and other processes, what were some things you learned being on a cloud platform that caused changes internally with your IT processes?

• 08:28 Beth Granberry

  Our biggest challenge has been working with the business developers. The Genesys platform is so flexible and easy to learn that our business team started prioritizing projects and doing development themselves in the sandbox. But when it came time to move that work into production, it wasn’t as simple as flipping a switch. Our team needed to protect the voice environment. So we had to come together and define a process: business developers work in the sandbox, and our team works alongside them and handles production. We’re now learning the tools that help us deploy to production faster, and that’s where we are on our learning curve today.

• 10:35 Michael Logan

  And making sure that you flip it over too, because it sounds like that’s actually the technical term.

• 10:42 Beth Granberry

  Yes, it is.

• 10:43 Greg Thomas

  That’s good. What I’d love to go to next is the new way of working. You’re partnering with the business, using new tools. What did the business teams see? How did you bring them along with this new way of working and these CX capabilities?

• 11:32 Beth Granberry

  Two things. First, we created a Genesys Center of Excellence. Business teams got excited. We had voice migrations and digital deployments happening at the same time, sometimes on the same day, so the COE brought everyone together. We coordinate what’s happening this week and next, ensure change control alignment, and confirm who has permissions. The COE builds the roadmap and reports to leadership on both sides—business and tech.

• 12:45 Beth Granberry

  Second, we realized other platforms in our org were also doing chat—Zendesk, Salesforce, etc. So I’m proposing a Target Operating Model. We’ll work with teams across Microsoft, Salesforce, Qualtrics, Genesys, Zendesk, and more to decide what each platform should own. For example, Salesforce can be our CRM, but Genesys may handle messaging. We’ll use the best tool for the job and integrate the rest. It’s about choosing what’s best for the customer, our ecosystem, and Global Payments overall.

• 14:48 Greg Thomas

  That’s such a good point—this is why interoperability and APIs matter so much. So let’s talk about benefits. Whether hard numbers or anecdotes, what are the key outcomes you’ve seen so far?

• 15:33 Beth Granberry

  Traditionally, we measured things like time to answer, abandon rate, IVR containment. With CX today, we also look at journey visibility. With Genesys, we can track a customer from a portal interaction, to chatbot, to chat agent, to voice. Even if they return two weeks later, we know the full history. It helps us be proactive—like sending SMS updates before a software upgrade. That’s not live yet, but it’s on our roadmap. We want to reach out and walk customers through updates before they even need to ask.

• 17:52 Michael Logan

  You’ve mentioned the roadmap—proactive messaging, journey mapping. What’s next for Global Payments? What’s on the horizon beyond what you’re already planning?

• 18:20 Beth Granberry

  Right now, we’re focused on delivering all digital capabilities. Long-term, we want to integrate customer journey data with QA systems, improve call recording and workforce management by moving to Genesys, and layer in fraud scoring and authentication. That way, agents know when they’re dealing with a risky interaction, and we handle verification upfront—not during the call. Those are 2–4 year goals, but they’re clear on our roadmap.

• 19:42 Greg Thomas

  That’s very cool. Final question—and we could talk all day—this has been so fascinating. What advice would you have for folks who are on a similar journey? What are 1–3 key things you’d recommend from your experience?

• 19:57 Beth Granberry

  First, align with the business. That’s mandatory. Technology alone can’t solve all problems. Your business teams know where customer experience can improve, and they should set the priorities. Enable them and partner closely. Second, use a great testing tool. During our Genesys voice migrations, the testing program gave the business incredible confidence. We had over 8000 test scenarios, and 800 users migrating today. Everyone’s confident because we’ve validated everything they asked for, and they got to test it themselves. Third, take full advantage of your vendor. Genesys has phenomenal resources—their knowledge base is up to date, and their people are incredibly helpful. Use that. And if needed, bring in a value-added reseller to help guide a large enterprise migration. That expertise matters.

• 23:45 Beth Granberry

  Beth, I think that’s fantastic advice—align with the business, test thoroughly, and partner with your vendor. Beth Granberry from Global Payments, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast and sharing your expertise with our listeners. Thank you to those listening and watching as well. If you like this podcast, please subscribe to get the next episode in your feed. Visit genesys.com to learn more about how you can level up your CX. Until next time, thanks for listening to Level Up CX Tech.