The News: Genesys and Salesforce have expanded their partnership, bringing together Genesys Cloud CX and Salesforce Service Cloud for a solution called CX Cloud from Genesys and Salesforce. Designed to help companies get more benefit from data and AI, this collaboration promises an AI-driven combination of respective strengths to help support seamless customer and employee experiences. More information on CX Cloud from Genesys and Salesforce is on the Genesys website.
Genesys and Salesforce Partnership Brings Together CCaaS and CRM
Analyst Take: This announcement from Genesys demonstrates action on what many end users have been wanting: a way to bring together contact center and CRM functionality for a more unified customer and employee experience.
Integration Offers AI-Driven Customer Experience
In a pre-announcement analyst briefing, Mike Szilagyi, Genesys senior VP of product management, described the companies’ collaborative process, importantly including customers as part of the process. Customers from each company were brought together to discuss what they liked from each vendor and what they really wanted to see in a combined solution. Common asks included:
- Deeper customer insights: An ability to bring together experience data for personalization and contextual and predictive understanding, and elimination of customer journey blind spots
- Efficiency through AI and automation: Bring AI into existing workflows, improve self-service and personalization, and give agents support
- Empowered employee experience: Provide a unified and AI-powered, contextualized agent/supervisor workspace, and modernize training and proficiency
- Greater value and outcomes: Move away from bespoke engagements to unified engagement channels and capabilities, allowing for more insights and workforce productivity
- Reductions in friction: “Make it easy” by moving from large services engagements to native pre-canned integrations and recommended deployment patterns
Data, Single Orchestration Engine, and Improved EX
During the briefing, Olivier Jouve, chief product officer at Genesys, described Salesforce and Genesys as being partners in helping customers in their CX transformation. One of the key benefits of this integration and one that will certainly boost movement toward optimal CX is the data piece. The partnership combines enterprise contact center and workforce engagement management (WEM) capabilities from Genesys Cloud CX with Salesforce Service Cloud. Data will be able to flow and be shared between the systems, allowing for an improved view and understanding of customer interactions, behavior, and history across the customer journey.
“Many organizations are challenged to efficiently leverage data and AI to meet rising customer expectations and drive long-term loyalty,” said Ryan Nichols, senior vice president of Service Cloud product management at Salesforce. “The new CX Cloud from Genesys and Salesforce will empower agents to leverage Einstein AI insights within the flow of work in Service Cloud to deepen customer relationships through personalized interactions, helping to drive repeat business and make positive impacts on their company’s bottom line.”
Synchronized, AI-ready data will allow people to have more context behind customer conversations and will give self-service bots the knowledge needed to fulfill requests more efficiently. This integration will also bring a single orchestration engine, using the orchestration abilities of Genesys Cloud CX. Complete customer journeys can be created to include data, bots, and channels from both the Genesys and Salesforce platforms.
Employee experience will be enhanced by using the single smart workspace from Salesforce Service Cloud in conjunction with Genesys Cloud CX. Customer, journey, and interaction history are supported by Einstein AI, the Salesforce AI technology, and Genesys AI. WEM capabilities from Genesys are embedded right into the employee activity dashboards in Service Cloud.
General availability of CX Cloud from Genesys and Salesforce is expected in October 2023 and will be available via Salesforce AppExchange or the Genesys AppFoundry Marketplace.
From my perspective, this partnership will benefit both companies. Genesys and Salesforce have already been working together for more than 10 years, and in 2021, Genesys received a funding round led by Salesforce Ventures (in addition to other investors).
There is a lot to like about the integration, including the fact that it answers the calls of customers who often struggle to bring together the puzzle pieces of CX. I like the focus on bringing together both CX and EX because that is where the true value of these investments can shine through. For those who watch the CX/EX space, this convergence of experience segments into single solutions is a sign that the integrations needed to truly optimize end-to-end experiences are making progress.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other Insights from The Futurum Group:
GSG Elevates EX and CX With the Use of Workforce Engagement Management
FedRAMP Authorization Achieved for Genesys Cloud CX
Genesys Launches the Experience Index for Contact Center Employees
Author Information
As a detail-oriented researcher, Sherril is expert at discovering, gathering and compiling industry and market data to create clear, actionable market and competitive intelligence. With deep experience in market analysis and segmentation she is a consummate collaborator with strong communication skills adept at supporting and forming relationships with cross-functional teams in all levels of organizations.
Sherril holds a Master of Business Administration in Marketing from University of Colorado, Boulder and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Rutgers University.
