The pressures to deliver on today’s customer expectations are intense. Customers expect seamless service journeys, no matter how many people, channels or departments are involved. And they’ll quickly shift to your competitors when their expectations go unmet. In fact, “The State of Customer Experience” report shows that more than half of customers surveyed will switch after just two to five negative interactions.

In the contact center, workforce turnover is high, draining knowledge and the investments your business has made in hiring and training staff. And while yesterday’s point solutions for supporting your workforce were quick and easy to acquire, they’re now proving difficult to weave together into a comprehensive, connected tech stack.

Customer service teams tie these manual processes and siloed technologies together themselves, leading to frustrating and time-consuming experiences for both your customers and employees. This inefficient “human middleware” approach contributes to poor customer experiences (CX) — and can cost your organization money.

Last year, Genesys announced a new strategic partnership with ServiceNow to explore how our companies and platforms could come together to solve these challenges. And, as Olivier Jouve, Chief Product Officer at Genesys, noted, “Bringing our platforms closer together will give our customers choice and flexibility as they work to elevate their customer and employee experiences.”

Today, I’m thrilled to share that Unified Experience from Genesys and ServiceNow is now available on the ServiceNow Store and the AppFoundry® Marketplace.

In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into our research and findings from designing and beta-testing this new solution together. And we’ll examine the 3 key elements that will help you deliver the unified experience your customers and employees expect.

1. Centralize Interaction and Work Routing

Deploying multiple systems to route and manage different channels and other systems entirely to assign and automate work across middle- and back-office teams can negatively affect not only your ability to deliver world-class service, but also your bottom line.

Customers are often forced to repeat themselves when they switch communication channels. Frontline agents receive work that doesn’t always align to their skillsets, and they must shift through multiple applications to gather information. This can only add to their frustration. The business is left with redundant tech systems that must be constantly maintained to keep operational – raising IT budgets year after year.

Unified Experience from Genesys and ServiceNow brings together the routing of front-office interactions with back-office tasks into a single artificial intelligence (AI)-powered orchestration engine. Routing is centralized in the Genesys Cloud™ platform which streamlines the delivery of work to the right people at the right time, integrating real-time experiences such as voice calls and chat messages with offline work like cases. This makes it possible for customer service representatives to be deployed across channels and types of work, improving utilization rates without overwhelming them because of conflicting routing rules.

2. Unify Teams on a Single Desktop

The CX and customer relationship management (CRM) industries have been discussing the concept of a “single pane of glass” for years, if not decades. Yet, many companies still require their agents, supervisors and subject matter experts to operate across separate, disconnected applications to communicate with customers and complete tasks to resolve their issues. This introduces costly human middleware to your CX processes.

While humans are still a crucial component to providing empathetic customer service, they simply cannot do their jobs effectively while also bridging the gap between data, channels and workflows. This can negatively impact every contact center KPI — from average handle time to customer satisfaction scores to agent retention (more on this later).

Let’s compare an interaction at a contact center with disconnected systems and departments with one using Unified Experience from Genesys and ServiceNow.

Unified experience from genesys and servicenow
Unified experience from genesys and servicenow
Unified experience from genesys and servicenow

The Unified Experience from Genesys and ServiceNow workspace can maximize workforce efficiency with access to native interaction controls, customer and operational data, workflow automations, and AI assistance — all on a single view. In comparison to legacy CTI-based integrations, this native approach eliminates intrusive pop-ups that cover data and interfere with service delivery.

And the solution automatically aggregates real-time operations data from ServiceNow and engagement data from Genesys Cloud into a common data source. This fuels AI and delivers real-time insights that agents can use to achieve meaningful outcomes quickly.

Sn agent activity rounded

Unified Desktop: Switching between systems takes time and effort. Bringing together Genesys Cloud and its vast toolkit of capabilities with ServiceNow CSM streamlines work delivery and execution to reduce average handle times.

3. Optimize Workforce Engagement

According to SQM Group research, the call center industry’s annual agent turnover rate has risen to 38% in 2022. Mike Desmarais, founder and CEO of SQM Group notes, “As a result of the higher agent turnover, job burnout, absenteeism, operating cost, and lower [first call resolution] FCR and [customer satisfaction score] CSAT, you can strongly argue that call center turnover is the most important KPI.”

New agents struggle to resolve interactions and cases on first contact. Even the most seasoned agents require the necessary tools and continuous professional development to become top performers. It can be nearly impossible to deliver a unified experience to customers with an inconsistent, ill-equipped workforce that doesn’t own and value their careers.

With Unified Experience from Genesys and ServiceNow, a personalized dashboard of their performance, schedule, adherence, training and coaching helps agents quickly onboard, stay on task and own their career development.  And, when support teams receive the right type and amount of work and lean on AI-assistance and workflow automation to make their jobs easier, both employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction can improve.

Sn agent workspace rounded

AI-powered planning tools: Optimize contact center occupancy by balancing interaction and case workloads with staff resources. This enables you to limit costly turnover with skill development and real-time AI assistance.

Deliver the Unified Experience Your Customers and Employees Expect

Combine the power of an industry-recognized leader in Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) with ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) to make every interaction easier for your customers, agents and supporting teams.

Unified Experience from Genesys and ServiceNow can simplify cross-department collaboration by connecting agents with back-office teams, insights and processes to orchestrate more efficient engagements. It centralizes interaction and work routing across channels and departments; brings together customer service teams and their work onto a single desktop; and optimizes workforce engagement, all powered by AI.

And consolidating your bespoke CX tech stack into a single turnkey offering can help to reduce the number of software tools, as well as the costs associated with software development and maintenance.

Watch this demo to learn more about how Unified Experience from Genesys and ServiceNow can help you increase workforce productivity, boost customer loyalty and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO).