Genesys crosses the channel

Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, an Alcatel-Lucent company, has revealed a key initiative called Cross Channel Conversations, which, according to the company, is designed to eliminate the gap between traditional contact centres, the Web and next-generation communication channels, reports TMCnet.

The new initiative will result in solutions that bring together critical elements of the contact centre, enterprise resources in the branch and back office, and virtual technologies, including the Web, chat, SMS, video, avatars, virtual assistants and smartphones with mobile applications.

"One of the greatest difficulties in customer service is to federate the context and history of the request based on past interactions on the same topic that might have been over different channels,” says Nicolas de Kouchkovsky, president of Genesys.

Asia-Pacific has been a high-growth region for the contact centre industry and the recent economic downturn has caused a minor set back to the industry, but future growth cannot be ignored, according to China Newswire.

In terms of total number of seats in Asia-Pacific, the contact centre industry was at about 1.7 million seats in 2008, but by 2014, the contact centre industry is projected to grow at compound annual growth rate of 10.5% crossing over 3 million seats.

The burgeoning industry growth brings along its unique set of challenges, like cost pressures, training and motivating agents, rising customer expectations, deploying Web and multimedia applications and more.

Really Simple Systems, UK vendor of hosted CRM systems, has opened an office in Toronto to contend with the US and Canadian market for simple, hosted CRM, according to CRM Today.

The office is a joint venture between Really Simple Systems and 4Growth, a Toronto-based business management and software-as-a-service (SaaS) distribution company specialising in SaaS solutions for small and medium-sized enterprises and large enterprises.

Steve Bielawski, managing partner at 4Growth, will head up the new operation.