Genesys releases version 7.2

Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, an Alcatel company focusing on contact centre software, has unveiled updates to its contact centre software suite, in line with its vision to achieve dynamic contact centres.

Genesys announced the release of version 7.2 at its G-Force partner and customer event in Athens last week.

Genesys executives at the event noted customer service was becoming the key differentiator for enterprises, with Wes Hayden, Genesys president and CEO, saying: "Never before have contact centres been so important."

Delegates to G-Force were talked through the future of contact centres, in which customer service and interaction will take place on multiple levels, through channels as varied as SMS, mobile multimedia and interactive voice recognition.

Key to controlling call centre costs and enhancing customer satisfaction, speakers noted, was efficient workflow within the call centre, and integration with the enterprise back office.

With this in mind, Genesys includes an update of its workforce management application as part of the v7.2 release.

The enhancement assesses anticipated staffing levels and coordinates the schedules of staff according to actual demand.

Among its features is "intra-day schedule re-optimisation", which allows contact centre managers to realign agent schedules during the day to ensure workloads are covered. The system automatically sends e-mails to call centre agents as their schedules change during the day.

The new application also includes "multi-site forecasting", which helps share call centre workloads across several contact centres, or into the back office of an enterprise. This allows for calls to be routed to specialists or the most appropriate agents immediately.

Genesys 7.2 leverages open IP and session initiation protocol technology, to support up to 30 000 agents and to provide intelligent routing, call controls and new forms of customer interaction such as Web, fax, SMS, chat or video.

Genesys describes the solution as "the only IP contact centre solution that uses a completely open architecture to support virtually any hardware or software platform", which allows for integration of various components without compatibility problems. It supports a mix of IP and time division multiplexing environments, which allows for a phased migration to an IP environment.

Genesys says migration capabilities are important since its global research has found IP telephony - or voice over IP - has "fast become one of the most important technology considerations for contact centres".

Its research had also found contact centre self-service channels would continue to expand, and contact centres will need to maintain more regular contact with customers to develop personal relationships with them.

Noting the contact centre is a "revenue generating opportunity", Genesys speakers highlighted how the Genesys dynamic contact centre approach can make use of quiet time in the call centre to automatically launch outbound campaigns and courtesy calls.