A new Forrester report on customer service solutions named Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU), a ‘Strong Performer’ in their assessment of interaction-centric customer service software. This is one of three categories evaluated in “The Forrester Wave: Customer Service Software Solutions, Q4 2008”, Forrester Research, Inc., October 22, 2008.

According to the report, “Interaction-centric customer service solutions focus on customer-facing interactions, offering deep functionality for agent, agent-assisted, self-service and eService on multiple customer interaction channels (e.g. agent, chat, email, IVR, etc.).” In this category Genesys received the highest score for “Market Presence.” The report also states, “Genesys is suited for organizations that are interested in internationalization because they have large-scale, global, multilanguage deployments and can provide local support for country specific requirements.”

The research firm’s latest report, “The Forrester Wave: Customer Service Software Solutions, Q4 2008” is designed to help software buyers navigate the increasingly complex set of business requirements, product feature sets, application delivery models, and integration choices needed to meet escalating customer experience expectations. This new report combines Forrester’s categories of customer service management and eServices into a single product assessment.

Each of the ten vendors included in the assessment of interaction-centric customer service software demonstrated the ability to efficiently and effectively manage the interaction and had breadth across the traditional eService market space. The report makes the following points about Genesys:

•Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, a telephony vendor, complements its strong agent/customer interaction hub with workforce management and business process routing capabilities that extend the contact center to branch offices and virtual experts Genesys builds reputations via smart routing and integrated self- and agent-assisted service.

•Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories' mission is to be the leading supplier of enterprise software and best practices that enable best-in-class customer service, including sales, through interaction management. This is based on proactive management of three pillars: creating rich interaction experiences, virtualizing resources, and providing end-to-end service entailing screen-pops, click-to-call, and business process routing.

•With a standards-based open approach, CIM Platform provides integration capabilities with leading telephony infrastructures, back-office integration with enterprise applications and broad functional extensibility through partners.
The Forrester Customer Service Software Solutions Wave report is clear: as product and price differentiation erodes, businesses are turning to customer experience to gain market share over their competitors.

“Addressing these needs today will give companies new ways to attract and retain customers. In the second half of 2008 we’ve seen clear evidence of this, particularly with millennials, consumers born between 1982 and 2001, who have grown up with technology and have much different expectations for customer service,” said Paul Segre, President and CEO, Genesys. “Companies can better serve the millennial customer base by extending their customer interaction environment to support Internet and multimedia channels and by letting them chose which channel to use when contacting your business.”

Source:C114