Genesys announces Work Automation and Task Routing
On June 20th 2023 Genesys made a huge announcement. Whilst "Intelligent Workload Distribution" had been a mainstay of Genesys 'Engage' on premise technology stack for many years, the ability to route, queue and measure the service levels on tasks and deliverables that left the contact centre for the back office was never possible in Genesys Cloud CX. That changes now, as Genesys is now bringing "Work Automation" and "Workload Distribution" to Genesys Cloud CX.
Bringing the front office and back office together
Consider a simple use case. For the sake of an example scenario, let's pretend that we are running an Insurance company. Our front line agents receive calls via a claims line that is dedicated towards noting and recording customer claims made against their insurance policy. The front line agent completes the initial record in the CRM (or other system of record) and releases that new task or activity into a workflow, task or activity that is managed by the CRM, not the Contact Centre itself. So, whilst we know exactly how long the customer queued for the agent, how long it took the agent to answer the call, how long it took to handle the call and how long it took to wrap the call by completing the CRM record, once the caller hangs up and the agent moves onto the next call the claim is in the ether. The agent has to trust that the claim will be seen by the relevant back office claims handling team and that it will be handled. If the claimant calls back in two days later for a status update, once again, the front office agent has to lookup the record in the CRM, dig through the records and try and find the current status.
What happens if the claim is complex? Perhaps its not in the easy box? The back office claims handlers may have the ability to cherry pick tasks, and given the freedom to do so, they preferentially pick the ones that they can handle quickly and without hassle. So, our complex claim languishes in the queue, but there's no clock ticking. There's no tracking of how long it sits there. Hopefully, a team leader or manager in the back office will notice it and ask someone to handle it. With Genesys Cloud CX Automated Task Management, we can take the activities required, wrap them in a workflow, and track them from cradle to grave, routing and queueing them for back office users just like the original claims calls are being routed and queued in the front office.
This powerful new technology stack to automate the flow of work, use work bins to park things that need additional attention, route things to the right people based on their skills and training whilst keeping the clock ticking on the measured and desired "Service Level Agreement" is the key to ensuring 100% of your commitments to your customers are honoured, not just in the call centre itself, but also across the back-office. Unifying the front and back office through intelligent routing, reporting and process automation will have a massive impact on your customers experience and it will definitely improve customer service. Done well, it could even reduce the inbound traffic as your customers will no longer keep chasing your call centre for updates on their claim!
Keeping the customer up to date
A key feature of Work Automation is being able to automatically notify your customer by email, SMS or even an outbound call in the event that status of their claim changes. Let's think of this as proactive notification! The follow up actions that used to happen in the back office can now trigger progress notifications that are sent automatically through the contact centre. That way, if you send a claim status SMS update to your customer and they reply to it, then the context, the customer journey and the reason for the response is 100% clear to all participants. The inability in most business to track or trace the actual real time status of a piece of work or tasks make it very difficult to provide factual updates on status programatically. This causes missed deadlines, broken promises, work backlogs and worst of all, frustrated customers!
Building on the success of "Intelligent Workload Distribution"
The author remembers building IWD projects on Genesys Engage in 2012, that's some 11 years ago! It's wonderful to see IWD like capabilities now entering the feature set of Genesys Cloud CX. As an integrator, this is extremely big news, because we can now readily go deeper into the processes behind our clients business, bring the data and the tasks to the forefront and help us cusotmers to,
- Create customisable workflows for more seamless task routing across the business
We even have a nice drag-and-drop capability to build endless possiblities for employee assisted or even fully automated workflows - Provide real-time visibility into every customer activity and any work type
We can even measure task completion time, current status and the actual back office employee performance metrics. This is big news, because the contact centre has suffered by the second accuracy for agent performance and the back office has never been assessed or measured in the same way. That all changes now! - Manage changing priorities for tasks and activities
The real-time visibility into the performance of your business allows you to adapt to fluctuating changes. It allows your business to define tasks based on service-level agreements and immediately change the priority of certain types of work to make sure that no customer tasks breach their service levels or are even missed completely - A single top down view of all back-office work completed
By integrating your back-end system tasks into the power of the contact centre engine, we can give you a single view of how you are performing, in real-time
Work Automation and Task Routing Summary
We are truly excited about this technology. Being able to give our customers a single source of truth for all back office tasks is big news. Our clients will be able to make more informed decisions because the data they have will be accurate and consistent. This works, even if there are multiple back office systems on different silo's of functionality. All that is needed is the ability to talk to those sources and applications over an application programming interface (API), so that we can attach relevant attributes to help with routing, distribution and providing context for employees receiving the work load tasks. The work bins feature is powerful too, because not all tasks can be handled immediately. Some may require additional input from other teams, departments or engineers, field technicians or suppliers. With work bins, your front and back office users can park tasks in a time mastered work bin, so they stay relevant and fresh and can be recovered to the work flow as soon as the necessary information arrives to complete the task. A super powerful feature is the ability to automatically notify your customers using email, SMS or whatever channel you like when the status of a task associated with them changes. It means that the customer will stop calling you to check on status, instead, now, you will be intelligently notifying them before they chase you.
Being able to write your own rules to change the priority of tasks and their progression through your work flows is welcomed too. That, with the ability to take automatic actions once statuses change, or the SLA is going to be breached are powerful too.
As to indications on the required license tier? Early indications suggest that these features will be available in GC2, GC2 with WEM Upgrade to GC3 or GC3. That's subject to change of course.