Genesys, Kanisa Team on New Customer Services

Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories Inc. and Kanisa Inc. unveiled that they are joining forces to improve customer service centers. The first part of the deal is a joint marketing agreement whereby Kanisa's ServiceWeb product will be sold by Genesys and Genesys's Suite 6 solutions, including Genesys Internet Contact solution, will be sold by Kinisa. A joint product that combines ServiceWeb and Genesys Suite 6 is currently under development. Details on that yet to be named product are still being hammered out, according Genesys executives. Meanwhile, customers can take advantage of the blended self-service and live agent solution. Kanisa ServiceWeb offers a self-service function that engages customers in a dialogue to query knowledge resources and retrieve the appropriate customer-requested document. The Kanisa ServiceWeb software implementation starts at $300,000 and increases depending on number of licenses. While Genesys' Internet Contact solution offers agent-customer chat, dynamic Web collaboration capabilities, email response management, Web forms and Web callback for assisted service. Pricing for the Genesys Suite 6, including Internet Contact module starts at $2,650 per seat. The combination of the two products result in a seamless customer interaction experience as businesses transition from Web self-service to assisted agent service, according to officials at Genesys, a San Francisco-based subsidiary of Alcatel. "Many companies with Web self-service strategies and systems [in which customers can access important information online] are not integrating them with their contact centers," stated Joanie Rufo, AMR Research Inc. research director, in an earlier report. " This lack of integration means that some customers are calling the call center after they have unsuccessfully searched for the information online, and the agents they are speaking to have no record of their unsuccessful search." Therefore, Rufo says it is essential to integrate Web self-service strategy with contact centers systems.