Genesys has announced that it has acquired the assets of the Solariat business, a social customer care and analytics platform company. With the Solariat acquisition, Genesys is further extending its social media engagement capabilities to help organisations deliver world-class customer experience.

Social media analytics are part of a growing market for business analytics and related services predicted to reach $81 billion in 2014, according to Gartner.

Managing customer interactions over social media carries unique challenges for companies, particularly as the volume and breadth of social interactions increase.If handled incorrectly, frustrated customers often will expose untimely company responses or misinformation via social media, which can erode brand reputation, lower net promoter scores, and increase customer effort.

With Solariat SocialOptimizr, the Genesys Customer Experience Platform will identify customer intent via social media, assign customer intent with an ‘action-ability score,’ and determine whether an automated or human-assisted response is appropriate.Using proprietary filtering technology, SocialOptimizr prioritises customer intent to optimise collaboration and dramatically improve company response times.

Additionally, as customer service, sales or marketing promotions trend via social media, Social Optimizr dynamically learns to apply smart tags on posts or tweets to improve social listening capabilities, report on missed social conversations, and populate the SocialOptimizr knowledge base to continually improve customer experience.

Leveraging the industry-leading Genesys Customer Experience Platform, organisations can apply a virtually unlimited set of criteria to determine how social media interactions are routed based on customer intent, and then reported on throughout companies of all sizes.

This integration results in a more accurate, timely and appropriate social media response. The SocialOptimizr solution will be fully integrated to the Genesys Agent Desktop, and the artificial intelligence capabilities in the SocialOptimzr platform will be applied to all of the interactions managed by the Genesys Customer Experience Platform.

The Solariat acquisition continues the momentum Genesys created for interaction analytics last year with the announcement of the Continuous Workforce Optimisation solution.

“Today’s customer experience leaders are facing a daunting task in trying to understand what their customers are saying in the social sphere, and what to do about it,” said Paul Segre president and CEO, Genesys.

“Combining Solariat’s patented social analytics technology with the Genesys Customer Engagement Platform will give Genesys customers a powerful new tool to deliver accurate and consistent answers across all customer touch points including social media.”