For businesses today, few things are more important than the customer experiences they deliver. More and more companies are realizing, however, that the key to an exceptional customer experience is an exceptional employee experience. This dynamic is growing in importance as many companies have enabled employees to work remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic for business continuity. Organizations have had to shift their operating models quickly, which includes ensuring they have the tools in place to keep their employees productive, happy and engaged from anywhere.

More Engaged Employees Mean More Satisfied Customers

Traditionally, most organizations took a workforce optimization (WFO) approach to ensure efficient, valuable customer interactions. But times have changed – especially now with new challenges to overcome. Workforce engagement management (WEM) has emerged as the critical element in meeting employee needs and achieving higher customer metrics, sales and profitability.

Much more than the latest flavor of WFO, WEM goes way beyond time management, forecasting and other operationally slanted functions. It also addresses the human side of the workforce, with practices such as recruiting, talent development, performance reviews, coaching and rewards. WEM shines a light on employees and their satisfaction while also enabling them to achieve greater productivity and deliver better customer experiences. These capabilities will prove even more important today as many organizations will need to consider new strategies to ensure their virtual employees have the resources and tools they need to be productive and stay engaged.

It can also help employees deliver more empathetic customer care when it matters the most, like right now. For example, by using sentiment analysis, employees can get a better read of a customer’s emotions so they can tailor their responses accordingly. While this type of capability is instrumental in providing a personalized experience anytime, it can be especially useful now as consumers face a myriad of challenges and uncertainty brought forth by COVID-19.

Genesys Workforce Engagement Management: Getting from Here to There  

There’s an increased recognition that WEM isn’t a nice to have, it’s a need to have. Even before the current environment where remote capabilities are a necessity, an increasing number of organizations wanted WEM in the cloud. We’ve delivered it to thousands of customers and are eager to help even more businesses in this regard. In fact, 82% of Genesys customers are looking for WEM cloud solutions today1, and 94% want to do so by 20232.

While our history in workforce engagement goes back two decades, we’ve taken giant leaps forward with the Genesys Cloud™ platform as the base to help organizations deliver the most comprehensive, all-in-one customer and employee experience. With workforce engagement management now fully embedded in the Genesys Cloud platform, nearly all customers are using basic capabilities while more than 60% are diving into more advanced applications using artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. With AI applications in recording, quality and compliance, resource management, and employee performance domains, Genesys Cloud Workforce Engagement Management boosts employee productivity and simplifies decision-making. And, we continue to push our innovative WEM solutions even further. The most recent example is the acquisition of nGUVU, which adds gamification to our workforce engagement management suite. We think adding a game-like experience at work will go far with the next generation of employees who flourish with a little (or a lot) of friendly competition.

Today, as organizations navigate the challenges of COVID-19, more contact center employees than ever are working virtually. Keeping them engaged is critical — gamification is a powerful way to do it. Not only can it trigger healthy competition and aid in skills improvements, it also builds comradery between team members, even if they’re not working side by side.

Emerging Leadership

Our progress thus far is getting noticed – especially among industry analysts. Gartner named Genesys a Visionary in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Workforce Engagement Management. We believe this achievement reflects our ability to provide all the features in the Gartner WEM functional domains, coupled with our ongoing commitment to deliver engagement-focused innovation. In the past year alone, we’ve tripled our Genesys Cloud feature velocity and delivery.

Frost & Sullivan recognized Genesys in the 2020 North American Workforce Optimization Innovation Excellence Frost Radar Award. The analysis recognizes providers who demonstrate a relentless focus on innovation and have highly differentiated services or functionality. Completeness of offer, key adjacencies to nontraditional areas such as gamification, and AI all contributed to our high innovation score. Specifically, Frost & Sullivan highlighted the full, in-depth range of WFO solutions under the WEM banner built for the Genesys Cloud platform and our heavy investment in AI across the portfolio. It noted that we’re the first company to use AI in automatic forecasting and scheduling, achieving 95% accuracy.

While we’re proud of our recent recognition from industry analysts, our work continues. In fact, we have many more exciting innovations on the horizon to enable organizations to strengthen employee experiences. After all, a highly engaged workforce is a core element of an organization’s ability to connect meaningfully with their customers. And that’s a core tenet of our vision, Experience as a ServiceSM, which helps organizations of any size provide true personalization at scale and foster customer trust and loyalty.

1 Real Genesys Customer purchasing patterns n=2303
2 May 2019 Genesys | Frost & Sullivan Market Study n=1310