Genesys: a must-see? In Meudon, a meeting of a very exclusive club

For almost seven years, within a little-known club, large companies have been sharing their tips and best practices for improving the performance of their call centres. What they all have in common is that they are equipped with Genesys, the dominant software publisher in large customer relationship organisations, where they sometimes have between 6,000 and 10,000 licences.

When 10,000 customer advisors and employees from the same company are working on the same tool, which you want to connect via an API with a third-party software publisher, a user club that is independent of the publisher can be a great help!

With its dominant position in the banking, insurance and telecoms sectors, the American software publisher sometimes causes a few cold sweats: while some companies have been equipped for years with on-premise solutions (managed and maintained on site, within IT departments), Genesys will stop maintaining these architectures in 2028, offering only cloud licences. The alternative is therefore simple for an insurer or Canal+: switch to the cloud version at its rates or migrate to another publisher. Which one? To date, only one French publisher has won a tender and displaced Genesys at a customer site. The same player was also selected by the subsidiary of a bank that is also a Genesys customer.

A club of which Genesys is not a member. 
On 30 September, during one of the club's meetings in Meudon, at Bouygues Télécom, these types of questions were discussed for almost four hours during technical exchanges. The nature of these discussions and their confidential nature demonstrate the difficulty and benefits of choosing a multi-channel customer relationship platform: Genesys does not provide examples of typical data or file models that they would maintain. 

“When we need to analyse, store, retain or handle thousands of telephone conversations in order to generate automatic conversation summaries, connect them to Salesforce or Verint, for example, or use Illuin Technology, these are the kinds of questions we ask ourselves,” says one of the CIOs present. “The publisher doesn’t always give us answers. So, within the club, we exchange ideas.”

-Created in 2018, the club was initially the Genesys user club. It has expanded to become the Genesys solutions and CX interactions club. 

-Its president is Joël Brandt, a technical executive at Bouygues Telecom with ten years of service, who previously worked at Infomobile.

-To become a member and join the 26 members of this non-profit association, you simply need to be a French-speaking user of Genesys solutions or other CX and CCaaS interaction solutions, according to the acronyms used in the industry. Each company must pay an annual membership fee of €990 and may delegate several members.

-The club has up to 135 contacts and must find a venue for each of its meetings. On the 30th, this ‘Davos’ met at Bouygues Telecom.

Present as a guest observer, we enjoyed the quality of the morning's timing and the richness and diversity of the technical questions. And the quality of the meal shared afterwards, nearby in the training restaurant of a Ducasse school. Delicious!

‘Above all, don't quote me, don't mention our company,’ repeats Ms S.D., who runs one of the contact centres of a very large company, with concern. We are beginning our consultation process with a view to possibly replacing Genesys. After an RFI, we will launch the RFP. And in fact, we have decided to only engage in dialogue and discussions with Genesys."

Surprised, I asked her and others to confirm: ‘You want to upgrade your equipment to equip several thousand call centre workstations, and you're only going to consult one American publisher, who sold you lifetime licences and is now telling you that you'll have to move to the cloud and pay annual rental fees. Is that right?’ " Indeed, replied the CIO.

I then understood the purpose of the club and why there were so few no-shows. I thought to myself that the experienced Joel had had a good idea. That in the modern economy, it was sometimes necessary to accept being tied to a single provider who had become indispensable.

The diagram above describes the maturity of the club members' thinking with regard to the Genesys publisher. Some have already migrated to the Cloud version, others are in the process of deployment (the logos of the brands that are members of the Club have been blurred).

The integrator business. 
To this end, many of them use the services of an integrator to install the solution, who will assess their needs and oversee the deployment of the solution. The project can take one or two years, depending on its complexity, and the daily rate is almost €1,000 per day.

‘When we ask our members for a membership fee of €990 per year, that doesn't even cover the cost of a single day of a Genesys consultant specialising in deployment projects,’ smiles Joel Brandt. ‘The ROI is quickly achieved!’

Delphine and Joël, dedicated GOs.
The club is run on a daily basis with rigour by Delphine Gingréau, who also manages another club of the same type, Oracle. The clubs have a bright future. Delphine and Joël are amazing GOs. Thank you for being our GMs for the morning.