Co-authored by: Olivier Jouve, EVP and GM, Genesys Cloud

Genesys has been powering customer experiences for some of the biggest global brands for more than three decades — touching the lives of millions of people every day. But over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic shifted consumers’ perceptions of what businesses can — and should — do for the world.

As part of our Sustainability efforts, we place huge importance on the resiliency and availability of our platforms to drive communications — whenever and however customers need. But the current global health crisis and ensuing economic challenges transformed how we view availability as an industry. It’s not simply aiming for “100% uptime” for the sake of exceeding industry standards. Instead it’s about how we enable customers to be there for their customers in challenging times.

Availability in Moments of Need

The pandemic has underscored the necessity for business continuity and an infrastructure that’s resilient to sudden and inevitable changes. In the first quarter of 2020, millions of Americans experienced sudden job losses. As people turned to state and federal agencies for support, it was crucial that government agencies remain operational to manage the influx of incoming requests for information and resources related to healthcare, mental wellness, unemployment benefits and more.

A large state unemployment agency was forced to deal with 20 months’ worth of claims in just 30 days — with 1.2 million people filing for unemployment benefits. Even with 1,000 call centre agents and additional support from other departments, it was abandoning 2 million calls per day. With the Genesys Cloud™ platform, the agency was able to pivot out of crisis mode and take control of the situation, processing 70,000 claims in a single day. Previously, that would have taken a full month.

Other Genesys Cloud customers were able to leverage the platform’s cloud-native architecture to seamlessly transition thousands of agents to remote work. The Genesys Cloud Customer Care team didn’t receive a single request for assistance.

A Genesys Multicloud CX™ customer, a large US state agency, saw daily phone call volume skyrocket from the typical 22,000 to upwards of 5 million per day by May 2020. Monthly web chat volume increased from 50,000 in February to 4 million in April 2020. The majority of interactions were people seeking information on unemployment benefits. It was like nothing we’ve seen before; even hurricanes that cause power outages and massive call loads to utility companies typically only have one- to two-day spikes. This was a months-long crisis with no clear end in sight.

Working closely with the US stage agency, our team quickly ramped up additional telecommunications infrastructure to assist with the flood of calls. In a span of a week, the team’s work was instrumental to helping citizens get much-needed information on access to unemployment benefits.

Genesys also maintains longstanding work with national and regional healthcare and insurance networks that provide life-saving services, including suicide prevention hotlines, emergency patient transfers and poison control, among others.

For these types of customers, the Genesys Multicloud CX team has specialised operating procedures in place. This process includes strategies like immediate escalation of customer-reported abnormality in the system to generate what we call “Severity 1” incident reports, whether needed or not, as well as SVP access to ensure world-class service and support from leadership. Our Resiliency Operations Centre (ROC) provides special response plays and human touch to closely work with customers to reroute traffic to our redundant networking sites, among others approaches.

Best-in-Class Security in the Cloud

In addition to resiliency and availability, security and privacy have always been embedded in, and fundamental to, Genesys. This means companies can trust that customer and business data remains private.

We work tirelessly to safeguard the privacy of our customers’ data, consistently auditing our environment to ensure compliance with internationally recognised standards, including ISO 27001, PCI, HITRUST, SOC 2 Type 2, HIPAA, CCPA and GDPR, among others. Because of our high standards for security and data privacy, dozens of US states and other countries have turned to Genesys Cloud for COVID-19 contact tracing — and to provide real-time information to the public about vaccine availability, distribution and scheduling.

In today’s digital world, having cloud-driven capabilities is key to creating better engagement and improving the citizen experience without comprising security.

While Sustainability is multi-faceted, we believe that committing to availability, resiliency, security and privacy paves a path for more sustainable enterprises.