Genesys debuts customer service GenAI, journey management

Today, Genesys revealed long-awaited journey management features and previewed a bevy of others to come to its contact center platform, including some powered by generative AI, for its Genesys Cloud customers.

Available now are Genesys Copilot for contact center agents and GenAI tools designed to help agents more quickly find answers to customer problems in product knowledge bases. Copilot can generate after-call summaries, which are a time sink in for human agents. Agent Copilot is the first of three role-based copilots, with ones for contact center admins and supervisors planned for release later this year.

Also available is Empathy Detection -- AI models that "hear" agent empathy in digital and phone interactions. They evaluate how well customers are seen and heard in a Genesys user's contact center. Empathy Detection can also be used to develop custom agent training that sharpens their emotional intelligence.

The Genesys Cloud features are the culmination of a five-year plan to provide users with better bots, find and improve empathy in customer service operations, and integrate modern customer journey orchestration tools into the platform.

"They said, 'We're not selling cloud-based contact centers. We're selling CX; we're selling employee experience. And we differentiate because we're more empathetic and we do a better job of journey management for better customer experience,'" Opus Research founder Dan Miller said. "They pretty much told everybody where they were moving, and now there's this checklist of capabilities that are enhancements included in their cloud."

Also planned for this fall are updated virtual agents infused with GenAI. The company promises these refreshed chatbots will handle more complex customer service tasks, gather more information and respond to ambiguous customer requests better than the current version.

Genesys senior vice president of AI product Brett Weigl said that while Genesys Cloud is entirely built on AWS and tends to gravitate toward AWS' products and tools, large language models are advancing so quickly that Genesys is building LLM flexibility into its platform so customers can choose their LLM. Such flexibility also lets Genesys switch the LLMs powering its built-in features.

"We release [updates] on a weekly basis anyway. But behind the scenes, we've got a data streaming pipeline that lets us quickly vet new capabilities, so we can expand as the things grow," Weigl said.

Some of Genesys Cloud's sentiment analysis tools integrated into its agents and copilots came from the acquisition of social listening tool Radarr earlier this year. As Genesys natively integrates Radarr tools to its platform, customers can utilize all of them through its AppFoundry partner platform.