At last year’s G-Force in San Diego, the company unveiled its Dynamic Contact Center (DCC), bringing the contact center beyond the phone to include customer contacts that come in from the Web, email, chat, fax, text message, and any other mode imaginable. Not to be outdone, this year, its big launch is the Intelligent Customer Front Door (ICFD), taking DCC a step further to bring a level of personalization to those interactions and tying them all together through front- and back-end business processes.
In just a week or two since first announcing the solution, it has already attracted big-name partners like Nuance, TuVox, and Voxify, all lending technologies to the effort. Interest has already built among the user base as well, with Air France, Belgacom, and T-Mobile among the first to sign on.
What makes ICFD so special is that it promises to make customer service convenient, consistent, personalized, responsive, and proactive; something badly needed in an age when customers have rising expectations from their company interactions, are super-empowered with information, and have the propensity to tell the world about good or bad experiences through things like blogs (Ed: See our user reviews for proof), and social networks. Companies have no less of a responsibility to learn and know as much as they can about their customers, and can leverage that through the ICFD.
As Brian Bischoff, Genesys’ vice president of voice platform sales and solutions told me, it’s all about eliminating customer frustrations in an age when 44 percent of customers who stopped doing business with a company did so because of a bad customer contact center experience.
Gone are the days when an IVR can contain a caller. Do that, and it¹s not just ‘Click’, but ‘Click and I’m gone’. ICFD could be a just the shot in the arm I need as a customer to not only continue doing business with a company, but to also walk in the front door and do more business with the company.

San Antonio is the seventh-largest city in the United States, and the cultural gateway to the American Southwest. It’s also home to this year’s G-Force, Genesys Telecommunications’ annual customer conference. As the first day of the conference comes to a close, I can’t help but feel a sense of novelty. Compliments of Genesys, I have my first metal belt buckle (with the Genesys logo emblazoned on the front, of course), a cowboy hat, and bandana, none of which I have any idea how I’m going to get on a plane. (Ed: Wear it on the plane!)

I also took in a bullriding competition, armadillo races, and a real Texas BBQ, and probably ate more ribs in one night than I will all year. But all the cool stuff aside, there’s much more to the conference than Texas-style fun. There’s a lot of work going on as well.

With more than 1,300 attendees from all over the world, it’s the largest G-Force ever, according to the Genesys people. This year’s event has seen a large number of Latin American customers (nearly doubled from last year), indicating just how large the call center industry is growing in that part of the world. In Brazil, Internet service provider UOL is taking more than 1 million calls a month from the country’s 33.1 million Internet users, and its biggest challenge is dealing with rapid growth using outdated technologies and poor system design. It turned to Genesys to bring all its customer-facing applications (phone, email, Web chat, etc…) together, and has achieved staggering first-call resolution, proper call routing, cost reductions, worker productivity, and sales growth as a result. Unibanco, a Brazilian bank, is handling 10 million calls a month with just 6,000 agents using Genesys systems.
G-Force is an international event, and American, Canadian, European, Australian, and Asian companies are also represented in full force. The one lesson from all this: No matter where in the world it may be, call center technologies are alive, well, and thriving. From Panama to the Philippines, Rio de Janeiro to the Rio Grande, may the G-Force be with them.

Speech Tech’s managing editor Len Klie will be attending the Genesys G-Force Conference this week in San Antonio. Being the task master I am, I’ve asked Len to blog from the conference during his stay there. Look back tomorrow for his first post, as well as Ryan’s logo for Len’s adventures - check out my VoiceCon logo for proof of Ryan’s MS Paint prowess. And now, your Monday morning moment of Zen:Julie the Amtrak Lady, a la Saturday Night Live.