Authors: Olivier Jouve, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Genesys Cloud, and Barry O’Sullivan, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Digital and AI

At Genesys, we talk a lot about experiences and the increasing importance of getting them right for customers. We have exciting news today that we believe will further solidify our ability to impact every step customers take along the way.

We’re pleased to announce we’ve entered into two agreements to acquire Pointillist and Exceed.ai, two companies changing the landscape for how brands engage with their customers. The acquisitions are set to advance Genesys capabilities in the Experience as a ServiceSM market by allowing companies to meet the dynamic nature of customer demands; understand and analyse multichannel customer behaviour across all interactions, proactive and personalised customer experiences; and unlock insights and cross-functional collaboration across services, sales and marketing.

Customer Experience Orchestration for Empathetic Experiences

Genesys pioneered Experience as a Service to help companies transform how they connect with customers and employees. It combines previously distinct software categories, like contact centres, experience orchestration, behavioural analytics, customer data platforms, workforce engagement management, artificial intelligence (AI) and digital customer engagement. The result is connected, empathetic, orchestrated experiences.

A recent Boston Consulting Group study found that companies can realise a 20-40% increase in customer advocacy when they adopt an approach focused on the customer journey. As an award-winning customer analytics platform that connects each data source, channel and touchpoint into a unified customer journey, Pointillist is at the forefront of understanding the flow of customer experiences over time.

Pointillist complements the Genesys offering by giving companies the ability to unify data, visualise journeys, measure effectiveness of the engagement and act on insights. Because access to data in silos is ineffective, access to the right data spanning all touchpoints enables true orchestration. The key capabilities to support this include high-volume identity stitching, streaming data integration, real-time triggering, collaboration tools and dynamic experience analysis. Now, companies can connect the dots between customer interactions and their business goals in seconds, rather than days or weeks.

Using customer journeys to optimise engagements, especially with the proliferation of digital channels, improves efficiency. And it can help sales, services and marketing use insights from data to drive empathetic action. Customers using Pointillist can identify root causes of increased volume and declining satisfaction rates and make changes in workflows to improve measurable KPIs. This is especially true when failures require more than one channel to resolve.

Further, by integrating natural language processing (NLP), customers can identify not only what, but more importantly, why. Customers also attribute an increase in cross-sell opportunities by using journey management analytics to identify purchase patterns. As digital journey proliferation increases in pace and importance to our customers, Pointillist will allow us to deepen, grow and scale our existing journey management capabilities.

Scaling Sales and Marketing with AI

Continuing our momentum in transforming digital customer experiences, we’re following our acquisition of Bold360 and the launch of the Genesys DX™ solution with another significant AI milestone on our journey to encompass more interactions beyond the contact centre.

Conversational AI is a rapidly expanding market. Some projections estimate the segment will grow from USD $4.8 billion in 2020 to around USD $13.9 billion by 2025. The unique approach of Exceed.ai, which uses conversational AI as a lever to augment sales and marketing, is a force multiplier for organisations and a seamless extension of Genesys digital customer engagement solutions.

Our investment in Exceed.ai will bolster our conversational AI capabilities and we believe it will position Genesys to capitalise on this exponential growth. Named a top 25 AI startup by Forbes Magazine, Exceed.ai has been known to grow lead generation for its slate of global customers by 35%.

The Exceed.ai solution features Intelligent Virtual Assistants that work alongside sales and marketing teams to qualify, nurture and follow up with leads — allowing sales reps to focus on closing deals.

Exceed.ai capabilities include lead intent and scoring that uses AI models to better identify prospects and gauge their receptivity to message content. Rich data on customer behaviour allows for personalised customer buying experiences. Like a human coach for sales reps on next-best actions, AI sales analysis communication tells businesses what’s working and what isn’t — all while engaging customers with meaningful chatbot interactions. It’s an exciting extension of the experiences we deliver in Genesys products today.

Enterprise-Wide Transformation for Genesys Customers

Ultimately, the integration of the Pointillist journey orchestration and analytics solution, with the Exceed.ai enhanced conversational AI designed specifically for sales and marketing, with Genesys leading CX and DX solutions will enable enterprise-wide transformation for customers. It turns siloed cross-functional data across the company into insights that can be analysed in real time to help companies deliver predictive, personalised, empathetic experiences at scale.

Both transactions are expected to close before the end of the calendar year 2021. Once the transactions close, we’ll be proud to welcome the talented teams from Exceed.ai and Pointillist to join us in going big and continuing to define the Experience as a Service market. And we’re incredibly excited about the significant opportunities these strategic integrations will create.