Genesys has announced an integration with Skype for Business to deliver best-in-class customer engagement, contact centre and unified communication solutions all from one single place: the Genesys Customer Experience Platform.
Genesys is one of the first enterprise-class contact centre solutions providers to achieve a native integration with Skype for Business using the Unified Communications Managed API, part of the Skype Developer Platform. This integration enables customers and organisations to seamlessly engage through video, voice and instant message as well as transfer between these channels without interruption.

Combined with the recent announcement of the Genesys omnichannel journey management capabilities, Genesys and Skype for Business customers can now deliver orchestrated customer engagement to each and every customer interaction and journey. The solution connects the customer with the best agent or subject matter expert in any department and location. Customer centricity with personalised one-to-one engagement is now a practical reality for organisations of all sizes in the contact centre or across the entire organisation.

“Leading organisations know that engaging their customers with the right expert no matter where they sit is ideal, but in the past some have viewed it as impractical. With Genesys and Skype for Business, organisations can easily achieve this ideal at any scale,” says Paul Segre, president and CEO of Genesys. “The new solution gives organisations the ability to take their business results to new levels, improving sales, building better brand loyalty and lowering costs.”

With the combined power of Genesys and Skype for Business, organisations are powered by an integrated solution to manage and optimise customer experience and communications. The integrated solution provides organisations with a converged communications infrastructure over which to route any interaction in any channel or to switch seamlessly between channels while capturing comprehensive analytics. The solution operates at any scale serving both small to medium organisations and global enterprises.

“Integrating Genesys Business Edition with Skype for Business gives us the advantage of a dynamic and flexible communications platform through which we have improved collaboration, while moving to a software-based system to easily assimilate acquired companies’ systems,” says Luc Greefs, Director of Shared Technology and Infrastructure Delivery at Cegeka, a Genesys customer.

New capabilities include:
* Rich Interactive Multimedia Capabilities allow customers to engage more personally with agents and to gain access to subject matter experts across the organisation.
* Seamless, Uninterrupted Channel Transitions enable customers and agents to move their interactions seamlessly between voice, video and IM in Skype for Business.
* Enhanced Genesys Omnichannel Desktop with Skype for Business integration gives agents and supervisors the ability to collaborate within their organisation or to engage with customers through the same desktop application over any channel.
* Seamless Journey Orchestration now includes the orchestration of interactions with anyone present and available via the Skype for Business infrastructure over any channel.
* Enhanced Reporting for contact centre operations for all interactions fielded by Skype for Business users regardless of device, channel or endpoint used.
“In today’s consumer driven digital age, businesses need to be more focused than ever on the customer experience,” says Zig Serafin, Corporate Vice-President, Skype Business Services at Microsoft. “By integrating its solutions with Skype for Business, Genesys gives businesses of all sizes the ability to provide a truly exceptional customer experience across all customer engagements.”
“In leveraging the core UCMA capabilities of Skype for Business, the Genesys solution has the potential to deliver significant value-adding collaboration and customer engagement for companies of all sizes,” says CX industry expert Don Van Doren, principal consultant at UniComm Consulting and president of Vanguard Communications. “By providing these new capabilities in a single software stack and integrated agent experience, Genesys enables rich customer engagement through interactions that are omnichannel, span the customer journey, and engage experts as needed.”

The Next Generation Genesys Customer Experience Platform with Skype for Business integration will be available in July 2015.