In conversation with Merijn te Booij, Global CMO of Genesys and Mohamed Afifi, Managing Director of Genesys Middle East on providing the broadest customer service and cloud solutions in MEA region.
What are the solutions that you offer?
Merijn te Booij (MB): We focus on three things – customer engagement, employee engagement and business optimization. Customer Engagement means creating a memorable environment for our customer interactions. We do that with four different solution sets – digital, inbound, outbound and self service. To deliver great customer engagement you need powered employees, and so we focus on employee engagement as well. We do this both from optimization perspective as well as in the multi-modal Omnichannel Desktop that we have. We also allow agents or employees to communicate with each other before they communicate with the customer, or in parallel through collaboration capabilities. Last but not the least you want to run this in a smart way, in a virtualized way with great performance in a secure manner. That’s where we do business optimization where we again have four solution sets – one focused on integration, one on platform which is all about virtualization, another on the ability to manage all your tasks and fourth is analytics.
How do you stand out from your competitors?
MB: We are differentiating and compared to our traditional competitors, we are single mindedly focusing on customer experience and the engagement models across marketing, sales and service. We feel good about our capabilities and I think this focus separates us from the other vendors which is very important for us.
Has the current economic situation affected Genesys?
MB: When you do global business, you do get affected by currency fluctuations and it does have an impact. From a growth perspective, despite the slump, we have done very well in this [MEA] region.
Mohamed Afifi: In Saudi Arabia, we have been hit in the government sector but on the other hand we see boom in Dubai from e-comm perspective. We need to diversify and ensure we are exploring different verticals. That is what we are doing in Saudi Arabia. We have not been affected because we sold completely different solutions there. This sector [customer service] has been quite the opposite because the strategies of the government here [Middle East] are also focused on customer experience. In the beginning of this year we got some new customers like noon.com, Aramex, Souq and Careem.
What are the challenges that you face with an economy like Africa’s?
MB: Africa is a very interesting market as a provider of large performance capabilities. It is a region that has opened up for growth. First, it depends on where you are in Africa, what you are selling and how. There are some larger economies here where from a Telecom perspective we have been doing very well. When facing a challenge, sometimes you need to take a completely different path to survive and it may not always be the traditional path. We have been present in South Africa for a long time now, building a partner based business model there.
You recently acquired Interactive Intelligence. How has this move added to Genesys’ solution offers?
MB: We offer cloud services through Genesys and have been doing this for a decade through our partner. Three years ago we went direct with cloud services for multinationals, and now with Interactive solutions we offer these services for SMBs as well. Interactive Intelligence is an adjacent market player that allows us to offer both cloud and on-premise model, globally. By adding it we got a completely rounded up portfolio that makes it possible to find a fit-to-purpose model for every client.
Where do you see Genesys by 2020?
MB: Right now we have the right labels, the right penetration and a great market share. The trend in the enterprise buyer domain is to measure customer experience and also invest in it. If we look at 2020 one differentiating element will be customer experience. It will not be the price of a product nor its positioning, rather it will be based on customer experience.
