In more suprising news, Genesys has announced that in the weekly updates to be published on June 28th 2023, that it will now be possible for organisations that have existing call recordings on a platform outside Genesys may now go ahead and upload their call recordings into Genesys Cloud EX!
We didn't see this one coming!
It has long been considered that the concept of uploading anything beyond Workforce Management Data for scheduling and forecasting purposes into Genesys Cloud was never going to happen. Well, we were all wrong. This new feature will allow 3rd party created call recordings to be uploaded into Genesys Cloud. This will then enable supervisors and the Quality Management team to review and apply the quality management evaluations and scoring against these interactions too. This makes the migration from legacy on premises Contact Centres to the Cloud that one bit easier as it's another barrier to the migration out of the way. There's one slight problem though. The organisation must be subscribed to the Genesys Cloud EX license tier. This powerful feature will not be available for Genesys Cloud CX.
What is Genesys Cloud EX?
Genesys Cloud EX, where EX stands for the "employee experience", is a separate base license from Genesys Cloud CX or Genesys Cloud CX Digital. The license is similar to CX, but does not include voice or digital interaction handling capabilities. This license assumes that the employees under this license tier are Collaborate users at minimum on Genesys and that they use a different call distribution system for their telephony. This license allows users to leverage the power of Genesys Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) on the voice interactions which they have actually handled on a third party contact centre platform, bringing them all just that one step closer to finally migrating fully to Genesys Cloud CX no doubt. The users wouldn't actually handle interactions in voice or digital channels in Genesys, instead, synchronising the data and voice interactions from the 3rd party system. This new integration is voice focused to start with, so don't expect email, SMS, web-chat, messaging or social-media interaction handling in multichannel Workforce Engagement Management anytime soon.
Via the Genesys Cloud EX solution, it is possible for Organisations to stay on a legacy ACD or Contact Centre platform but still get access to Genesys for Quality Management, Workforce Management (Scheduling, Forecasting, shift swaps, time-off requests and the mobile applications too) and Gamification, without the heavy costs associated with buying additional technology silos to conduct those 3 key functions. The integration between the two systems synchronises resources from the external system directly to Genesys Cloud, with the actual call recording data actually being bulk uploaded to an Amazon AWS S3 bucket for the recording storage itself. Genesys Cloud CX then accesses the recordings from that S3 bucket and does its thing.
The architectural principles
Via the Genesys Cloud EX integration layer, the clients external ACD or Contact Centre Platform injects conversation events, agent routing status events and agent status updates directly into Genesys Cloud EX over the published API endpoints. Optionally, and the import bit, is that the client can bulk upload voice recordings too, making it possible to use Quality Management even though the voice calls were actually handled and recorded on the 3rd party system!
The Key Concepts
- You cannot add Genesys Cloud EX to a CX or DX Organisation
- The resources are synchronised into an organisation provisioned with the Genesys Cloud EX product
- Agent presence and routing status information is injected into Genesys over the Genesys Cloud public API endpoints
- Conversation data is injected representing the processing of interactions within that Organisation, referencing the synchronised resources
- Recordings from the external systems are uploaded (optionally) to Genesys Cloud, with the associated metadata referencing that conversation. (This bit is in beta, so expect restricted availability)
- Presence, Routing Status and conversation data are processed by the Genesys Cloud components resulting in native Genesys Cloud presence, routing status and conversation data being processed
- At a high level, from their, your performance dashboards, gamification, Workforce Engagement Management and Workforce Management all function as if the data had been native to Genesys in the first place
- The users, as collaborate users, will be able to log in to Genesys to access all Workforce Engagement Management features and collaborate with other users
The early limitations
- Only voice conversations are currently supported
- It will support injected content only. Genesys Cloud EX cannot handle native interactions itself, but there's a hint in it being a current limitation, that this may not be the case in the future!
- Only a single 3rd party platform can be integrated in this way to Genesys Cloud EX
- Reading the announcements from Genesys seem to hint that the ability to do the injection and recording upload and access the resource API's may be possible on other Genesys Cloud products in the future. (Now, that was a forwards looking statement!)