Salesforce and Genesys discuss CX strategy, coopetition

Tech companies partner for mutual benefit all the time. But in the customer service and contact center sector, things are heating up as the old guard providers including Genesys, Five9 and Nice take on big new competition from AWS, Microsoft and Google.

To bolster their own positions, longtime partners Genesys and Salesforce created a joint platform called CX Cloud, released earlier this year. It combines Salesforce's mature Service Cloud and CRM with Genesys' popular contact center as a service (CCaaS), telephony, journey management and employee-centric workforce engagement management tools that optimize contact center operations and track agents' satisfaction with their jobs.

The two vendors also compete in technologies such as AI, generative AI, digital engagement and other areas. How does this all work? We got Olivier Jouve, Genesys' chief product officer, and Ryan Nichols, Salesforce Service Cloud's chief customer officer, on the same video call to explain their coopetition strategy.

Editor's note: This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.

Salesforce and Genesys are partners yet competitors. Explain the relationship.

Olivier Jouve: It's how we get better together. For instance, Salesforce is running the desktop for all, so we're not going to try to compete on the desktop. We are pretty strong on the workforce management side.

How can we have a place on Salesforce so their users can benefit from our scheduling, forecasting, quality management and a lot of other things? The best answer is to give flexibility to customers. That is providing each tool -- each customer will have specific needs, they may support some digital channels with Salesforce and others with Genesys -- and combine them on CX Cloud. I think that's the level of flexibility that customers were expecting, and that's why we did this integration. So, there is no more competition. The sellers from Salesforce and Genesys work extremely well together.

Ryan Nichols: We've had an integration between Salesforce and Genesys since 2015. I wish I could say that we predicted the incredible transformation in technology brought about by large language models when we embarked on the latest stage of this deeper integration.

It certainly adds interesting and compelling reasons for our customers to [integrate], because one of the challenges of open CTI [computer telephony integration] is that they're a little skin-deep, right? It's a UX-level integration with kind of an iframe in the corner of your CRM console. A lot of customers have seen a lot of success with that -- and will continue to. But having deeper integration -- not just for voice, but also for digital channels -- just laid out on both of our platforms truly can foster customer choice because we have the data architecture in place. Our customers will benefit from the most important thing, which is that unified sense of who their customers are in all their conversation data. And then how they choose to make use of that data. They're going to use some tools from Genesys to do that, they're going to use tools from Salesforce to do that.

The cloud hyperscalers -- AWS, Microsoft and Google -- also offer contact center tools. Is it a five-way boxing match for customers, or does every customer use a little bit of everyone's tech?

Jouve: If you look at what a CCaaS solution is doing and what function Salesforce is doing, there is a little bit of overlap, but you don't replace one with the other. They have to work together. Yes, we compete with other contact center vendors. [The CX Cloud with Salesforce] has the benefits of having two major actors working together and combining the same framework and architecture.

Whenever two vendors that enterprises consider partners show up and can't get along, it's incredibly frustrating to a CIO.

AWS actually is our No. 1 partner to resell Genesys Cloud. It's a complex world, but honestly, there is no real competition between Salesforce and Genesys -- that's not where we spend our time on the field fighting.

Nichols: That's exactly right. What I discuss with most companies is solving challenges in their journey toward fully digitizing customer engagement and meeting customer expectations -- and doing so in an efficient way in this environment of inflation and global uncertainty. It's never been harder to be a service leader. They need all of their partners to work together, and they expect us to.

Whenever two vendors that enterprises consider partners show up and can't get along, it's incredibly frustrating to a CIO. They say, 'Look, why can't you both focus on solving my problems?'

How does that work? Google users plug in their Contact Center AI services, AWS shops plug in Lambda and Polly, etc., and let it rip?

Jouve: We provide all of the technology customers need to combine with Salesforce, but Genesys is an open platform with a marketplace, some public APIs, and we have a lot of integrations. So, we integrate through CTI, the Microsoft stack, or with code, or whatever -- you name it -- if the customer wants it.

Nichols: Time to value is really important for organizations that want to move quickly and transform their CX. We also have an open platform with lots of different integrations. Certainly, there are customers of ours who choose from many of those and assemble solutions, but we're always looking for ways to have deeper integrations that help customers get value faster. And that's certainly one of the major benefits of the new integration approach that we have between Salesforce and Genesys. You get a prebuilt integration, and you get more from both of our platforms faster than you could previously, or with competing approaches.

What kind of users are signing up for the joint Genesys-Salesforce CX Cloud? Is there a certain vertical or a certain customer size with which you find better traction?

Jouve: It's certainly been all over the place with some very, very large ones and some smaller ones. It's interesting -- sometimes smaller companies jump on innovation faster than others. We have a bit of balance. Genesys covers contact centers from 20 agents to 40,000, 50,000, 100,000. Salesforce covers that as well. We'll have some wins in every single vertical and different tiers in terms of size.

Nichols: It's been interesting to see some of the faster-moving smaller users for whom this new style of integration makes [CX Cloud available] like an enterprise would have had to build a deep integration on their own before. This productizes that integration and makes it available to more customers, so we've seen great adoption in smaller accounts.

We can also talk about [payroll services provider] ADP, a large, joint customer of Salesforce and Genesys. ADP has held both Genesys and Salesforce to meet the challenge of delivering a proactive customer experience where things are resolved even before they become an issue for their customers. Nothing's more critical than when you're running payroll.

Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.