E.piphany, Genesys Join Forces

Imagine state-of-the-art analytical tools crunching giant data repositories to come up with key customer insights. It's a tremendous feat, and useless if you can't get these insights into the hands of front-line contact center agents while customers are still on the telephone. But real-time analytics and intelligent routing are two very different technical centers of excellence. That's why CRM vendor E.piphany teamed with routing specialist Genesys to integrate their offerings-- specifically, E.piphany E.6 customer service software and Genesys Suite 6 contact center solutions. The companies hope to deliver a packaged solution later this year. For customers, a packaged solution speeds implementation and lowers cost of ownership, claims Paul Williams, worldwide channel marketing manager at Genesys. He says the goal for this sort of project is to "take 80 percent of normal services work and productize them." More importantly, the solution will give contact center agents access to the latest data on a particular customer, which may result in cross-selling opportunities or help identify customers at risk of churn so that discounts can be offered. Brad Wilson, vice president of product marketing at E.piphany, says the companies have been in talks over the past nine months leading up to this week's announcement. The strategic partnership was prompted by a dozen mutual customers, Wilson says. Then again, E.piphany has been champing at the bit to become a Genesys partner; Genesys has similar partnerships with CRM vendors Siebel, PeopleSoft and SAP. In the intelligent routing space, Genesys competes with Nortel, Aspect Communications, Avaya, Kana and Cisco. Interestingly, E.piphany struck an alliance with Cisco late last year. Why all the bed-hopping? "The joint goal is to try and simplify the integration in front of the enterprise customer," says Joseph Heinen, vice president of strategic marketing at Genesys. Tom Kaneshige also writes for Line56.com