Be willing to change
Segre believes the separator between companies that provide a smooth and satisfying journey for customers and those that don’t is the good ones make it part of their mission and vision.
“Part of their values is providing a great customer experience,” Segre says. “And when that right sort of tone is set from the top, you can make it happen. We’ve actually implemented NPS ourselves, and it really does force people to adjust to the fact that either customers are happy or unhappy. And if you put in place the right process, you get on top with continuous improvement.”
Creating a business that can provide this level of service is not always easy. When Genesys split from Alcatel-Lucent, it didn’t have any of its own systems.
“We got to rethink everything,” Segre says. “We relied on their ERP (enterprise resource planning) and workforce management and CRM (customer relationship management) systems and things like that. So, we sort of had a gift that we had to seize the opportunity of redoing all that. It allowed us to rethink a lot of the processes as well.”
Another aspect of the change was the move from voice to digital channels and the evolution of journey management.
“We had very good investors who sort of took the long view and were eager to support us in expanding our business,” Segre says.
Genesys went on an acquisition binge, acquiring roughly 10 companies in a period of 18 months to position the company for the goals it wanted to achieve. During that time, the company went from a 2,000-person business to a 3,000-person business.
“We have a very strong culture around providing great customer experience,” Segre says. “It’s the business we’re in. And yet, we had to pull in all these people, disparate folks. So a lot of my personal time was really maintaining the focus on the end customer and customer experience. Sort of a passion around that if you will, as you’re adding a thousand people who are not previously Genesys people.”
One of the factors in helping the culture keep up with the growth was the financial stress that forced Alcatel-Lucent to spin off Genesys.
“They were under a lot of financial pressures, so they weren’t necessarily investing,” Segre says. “So we had not made as much of an investment in our process and tools as we should have.”
Segre says you have to have closed-looped processes where you measure any “detractors” or “passives,” the bottom two levels on the NPS chart. The “promoter” is at the top, representing the customer who loves your service and continually tells others about it to get them in on it too.
“You look at what the issues are and upgrade your processes,” Segre says. “These could be how you sell, how you serve, the support you offer, the tools you use to offer it, your training or how you bill customers. We’ve made huge strides there. We’re very proud of it. We do transactional surveys for our care group and our professional services group.”
The next step
As Segre strives to become an even better company, the focus often turns to flow.
“The reality is today, companies know it’s having a website, they know it’s having a mobile, they know it’s having a contact center, but they don’t know that flow,” Segre says.
“So we think we’re really uniquely positioned to provide analytics data to companies on exactly how their customers are engaging with them by journey, by product or by demographic because we have access to CRM data. And that will allow them — will allow us — to implement better tools. It will allow them to re-engineer processes that aren’t working well.”
Over the next three to five years, Segre says the biggest investment will be around even better analytics tools.
“That’s both to give the agents and the people dealing with the specific customer better insight into how to either have good customer service or an effective sale, but also the aggregated data so that people can re-engineer the process,” Segre says. ●
How to reach: Genesys, (888) 436-3797 or www.genesys.com
Takeaways
- Think about your customer’s journey through your business.
- Integrate your mission and vision into your work.
- Keep searching for ways to do it better.
The Segre File
NAME: Paul Segre
TITLE: President and CEO
COMPANY: Genesys
Education: Bachelor’s degree in mathematics, master’s degree in operations research, Stanford University, Stanford, California.
Segre before Genesys: He held senior positions at DSC, Bell Labs and AT&T Network Systems in strategy, business development and operations support systems development.
Segre on today’s CEO: A lot of CEOs today are driven by one of two things. Either they see too much complexity and they’re looking at a cost play to get costs down by having common systems, or they see that customer experience can be a competitive advantage.
Segre on the future: People keep asking, ‘Are you going to do anything more in the near term?’ And it’s like, ‘No, our plates are pretty full.’ So we’re going down market, we’re shifting to the cloud. We’re growing pretty quickly. Our aspirations are to complete the journey that we’ve begun. And what you’ll see from an investment perspective is really a shift that I referenced more to the analytic side.
