Since Genesys and Salesforce expanded their partnership in September, I have continued receiving questions about it.
Today, I had the opportunity to listen to Sheila McGee-Smith's webinar with Rekha Srivatsan, VP of Product Marketing at Salesforce, and Jack Nichols, VP of Product Management at Genesys. It provided the perfect venue for me to share my thoughts.
The two companies have long worked together and, just before Dreamforce, announced an enhanced relationship (see Sheila's excellent article).
It's important to put it in the context of Salesforce's trajectory in the contact center space. Over the years, the CRM powerhouse has steadily grown its capabilities:
In 2010, it acquired Activa, a live chat provider - the first building block of its now comprehensive digital customer service suite.
In 2014, it introduced Lightning, initially focused on unifying agent desktops.
In 2016, it added Omni-Channel Routing for distributing interactions across channels and to agents.
In 2019, the company OEMed Amazon Connect as Salesforce Service Cloud Voice, adding voice.
These steps expanded Salesforce’s contact center footprint and its overlap with CCaaS providers. In early 2023, it renamed its offer as Salesforce Contact Center - fully embracing contact centers as a strategic growth priority.
In 2021, Salesforce introduced Service Cloud Voice for Partner Telephony BYOT (Bring Your Own Telephony), a new interface for contact center software only leveraging their telephony and IVR functions. It presented customers with an integration dilemma - traditional CTI or the newer one.
Genesys and Salesforce now have 650 joint customers representing over 150,000 agents. The jointly designed blueprint around Salesforce CRM, Genesys Orchestration (routing) and WEM, and Salesforce Agent/Supervisor Workspaces provides them with a clear path forward. It gives customers the flexibility to leverage the AI capabilities of both providers and handle digital channels using either. The partners are developing a shared data model enabling personalization and enhanced AI.
The recurring themes I heard during the webinar were “excitement” at the potential and “removing friction” - which summarize it well. I look forward to checking out their joint offer when it is released - view the recording to learn more.