Genesys Announces a New Social Media Strategy

Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, an Alcatel-Lucent unit that provides enterprise and contact center software, recently launched a new strategy for social media, one that allows companies to use integrated tools to monitor and address consumers through social media channels.

The Alcatel-Lucent Genesys Social Media Strategy (ALGSMS) aims to provide enterprises with a cohesive approach to social media that encourages three efforts:

• prioritizing actions,
• engaging with individuals, and
• focusing resources on consumers of particular value to the company.

According to company officials, the ALGSMS is designed to integrate conversations across marketing and customer service units. The hope is to show the value of leveraging expertise from throughout the enterprise, the success of which will help put an end to departmentalized and siloed approaches.

The ALGSMS includes the following capabilities:

• New upgrades that integrate with Facebook and Twitter to respond, inform, and notify consumers while leveraging Genesys' customer interaction management platform to direct and route messages to the most appropriate resource.

• A community-building platform from Lithium Technologies — which was named a Rising Star in CRM's 2009 CRM Market Awards. The platform, combined with Genesys' contact center and customer service offerings, promises to allow enterprises to monitor and address consumer issues outside of the traditional contact center. Agents are given visibility into valuable community content and consumers can easily navigate from self-help to a live agent.

• The ability to integrate social monitoring through an open interface, enabling agents to listen to and capture content from consumers on social sites. Genesys software then manages, prioritizes, escalates, and routes the interactions to the best possible resource, and also assigns service-level agreements to that interaction.

Ian Jacobs, customer interactions analyst at Ovum, compares the solution to standard contact center practices: "When you call into a call center and the call center knows something about you…some information you provide…is used to [gauge] the priority of that call or whether that issue is a pressing issue. Then the company systems will decide how to respond to you. [It's the] same kind of process for social media."

The breakdown in communication between the contact center and the Web experience, Jacobs adds, is often attributed to the fact that different teams control and maintain each channel. Contact centers may be "slow-moving" entities, he notes, but "the contact model, for all it's dysfunction, does work."

Jacobs describes the ALGSMS as "a step in the right direction" for integration, but says he still has yet to see any vendor put forth what he calls "an aspirational model."

"The customer is now taking control of the conversation," Jacobs says. "This is [still] a problem for all of these people asking, ‘How do we get customer interactions via social media in the contact center?' "

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