This week, 30 years ago, Genesys was incorporated as a company in San Francisco.

We’re grateful to all our customers, especially the approximately 30 (interestingly enough) from around the world who’ve been with us for the company’s history, and to our employees and partners who’ve enabled our journey to become the leading multicloud company we are today.

As we reflect on our history, we’re particularly proud of our strong record of consistent innovation over the past three decades. We’ve had a number of firsts, including the first digital channels (email and chat) in 1998, the first contact centre in the cloud in 2009, the first suite of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered applications in 2019 — and the first multicloud customer experience offering in 2020.

Looking ahead, our vision is to create a new category in the customer experience industry called Experiences as a ServiceSM. And that vision is grounded in the concept of empathy.

Empathy is a powerful construct for better businesses and a better world. It’s not a synonym for being nice. Empathy is about respect; it’s understanding the context of a person’s situation and treating him or her in light of their unique situation. In some circumstances, empathy can be transactional. Other situations call for a more personal interaction. In an ideal world, the type of interaction would be determined by the recipient’s needs and preferences. After an empathetic interaction — no matter the message — recipients feel understood and that they’ve been treated with dignity and respect.

I believe empathy is the next frontier in technology. And Genesys uniquely positioned to deliver on that promise.

Our contact centre solutions support more than 70 billion customer experiences each year. We can take the data from those interactions, combine it with customer data from other companies (see our recent press release on our partnership with Adobe) and then orchestrate that data using cloud technology and AI to deliver hyper-personalised experiences for customers.

Based on a customer’s preferences, our solution will anticipate when to send a transactional request to a bot and when to route a more complex situation to a customer service agent.  When that call, email or text is sent to an agent, the agent receives the customer’s full-service history as context before they even answer the call. This means customers have an experience that’s efficient, effective and personal — three pillars to an empathetic experience.

At Genesys, we’re very proud of what we’ve achieved in the past 30 years and we’re ready to bring another 30 years of exciting innovation to the market — starting with Experience as a Service.