Genesys, Google bolster contact center connections

Google and Genesys expanded a years-long cloud partnership to run Genesys Multicloud CX  on Google Kubernetes Engine, which will be live in the next 90 days.

In addition, Genesys contact center apps and Google Contact Center AI services will be further integrated. Features in the pipeline include embedded bots and natural language processing with real-time events such as phone conversations combined with historical data, mixed and matched in public and private clouds.

A Chrome plug-in to make Genesys applications available in the browser is available now.

These capabilities are a continuation of a multi-year partnership in which Google and Genesys jointly collaborate on infrastructure, AI and analytics tools for contact centers. On the roadmap and in development are features to orchestrate customer journeys, customer self-service, predictive customer satisfaction, AI-driven multifactor authentication and conversational channels that tap Google Search, Maps and other services.

"These integrations allow organizations to use real-time streaming events and historical data from across their businesses," said Bronwyn Hastings, Google head of technology ecosystem. "They can do that in a preferred infrastructure, where they have governance and controls and customizations in multi-public-cloud and private-cloud environments."

The moves reflect Genesys moving more deeply into contact center as a service to better compete with Amazon Connect -- also a Genesys partner -- and stake out its piece of an estimated $20 to $30 billion market, said Opus Research founder Dan Miller.

Google doesn't have a competing contact center application, but it provides complimentary services for bots and natural language processing atop its cloud environment. Some of Google's technologies, such as speech recognition and synthesis, are better than its competitors' tech, Miller added, which makes them appealing to enterprises with large contact centers.

"All this stuff that was built around many generations of what is now Google Assistant, and they had also been doing directory assistance, so they have proper names and numbers that they recognize and street addresses," Miller said. "So, in many dimensions, companies would prefer to have Google's smarts associated with the contact center."

Genesys also recently acquired Pointillist and Exceed.ai as it builds customer analytics as well as sales and marketing automation features into its offerings. It's part of a larger plan to add customer experience capabilities to the Genesys contact center technology base.

Google and Genesys have hundreds of mutual customers, said John Hernandez, executive vice president and general manager at Genesys Multicloud Solutions. The Google-Genesys partnership may include new consumption pricing models for Google Cloud Platform users, he said.

"The meetings in each other's R&D organizations continue to blossom, and the relationship between our engineering staffs is getting closer and closer," Hernandez said.

Don Fluckinger covers enterprise content management, CRM, marketing automation, e-commerce, customer service and enabling technologies for TechTarget.