Transforming the customer journey

Genesys, a global provider of omni-channel customer experience and contact centre solutions, has enjoyed 54-percent growth over the last three years according to Country Director of Genesys Malaysia, Muzaffar Ariff.“This is partly attributed to existing customers being loyal, and even in Malaysia, customers tend to retain Genesys solutions, and then upgrade over time,” he said.

Interestingly, solutions in the contact centre space had typically begun with voice interactions, but over the years have expanded to leverage the Web, emails and soon to come next, social media.

A recent survey that Genesys commissioned the Economist Intelligence Unit to do, of 516 senior-level execs in 21 countries, found that over the next three years, face-to-face interaction between companies and customers will decline as digital channels become more prevalent.

(L-R): Tan Choon Seng and Muzaffar Ariff

A majority of execs in Asia Pacific (APAC) also see social media an emerging customer channel of choice, and this region is investing accordingly to meet this influx of demand.

Why omni-channel?

The journey management for customers when they interact with brands, have come a long way since the early 90s. A customer call-in or a case used to be tagged and then escalated to customer service officers.

By the early 2000s, more channels appeared and customers could pick and choose the channel they were comfortable with, to interact over ie. web chats, social media, phone calls and so on.

Having more choice is all well and good, but organisational structure saw to it that cases, would be handled in siloes.

Genesys ASEAN Managing Director, Tan Choon Seng said, “You don’t want a situation where you talk to an agent who doesn’t know what is going on. You want the customer to navigate from one channel to another, with context attached to them, along their whole journey with a brand, so that they don’t have to repeat their issue over and over again.”

The contact centre is also attempting to break out of its siloes, with solutions by Genesys that can integrate the contact centre to more organisational functions like enterprise workflow management.

Credit card applications, for example. Muzaffar noted a trend of banks diverting more of that capability to contact centres.

“Extending workflow functionality so that contact centres can close the loop for credit card applications or remittance management, does require backoffice functions to agree to the same level of service levels, so that an organisation can standardise on service level agreement (SLAs) end-to-end.

“Ultimately, a bank can serve what customers are looking for, and banks are putting a lot of investment into this.”

He also shared that it is not easy to monitor a customer’s digital journey, but Genesys focuses on better tracking of how customers behave across channels. “This creates a higher opportunity for cross-selling (products and services),” he said.

Genesys presence

“APAC is a region where we have relatively strong presence with 331 global employees located here, and 15 in Malaysia,” said Muzaffar. There are also around 700 customers in this region, spanning across industries like telcos, retail, manufacturing and more.

“In Malaysia, four out of the top five telcos run a Genesys platform, and three out of the main five banks also use us,” he also said while adding that there is huge opportunity in the e-retail space in Malaysia as well.