Elcenora Martinez, Global Vice President of AI and Cloud Product Marketing at Genesys, talks about their recent acquisition of Pointillist, and Exceed.ai as they continue to build out their customer engagement ecosystem. Along the way, we discuss some of the broader themes affecting CX right now and then, we get Elcenora’s take on what CX-forward companies should expect over the near term. Great conversation with someone who has a unique perspective on the marketplace.
Below is the the full transcript of our conversation.
TheCustomer
Hi, I’m Mike Giambattista of theCustomer and today I have the pleasure of speaking with Elcenora Martinez who is Global Vice President of AI and cloud product at Genesys to talk about some of their recent news what that means for her specifically Genesys and maybe even kind of in a macro way, what that means for the world of CX. So welcome and thank you Elcenora. I appreciate your being here.
Elcenora Martinez
Thank you Mike – lovely to be here.
TheCustomer
So, can you elaborate on your role at Genesys and what you do, what you cover there.
Elcenora Martinez
I actually started my career in hospitality so what a better way to learn what customer experience really means and customer service and loyalty and, you know. Hospitality actually was on the leading edge of things like customer surveys you know. People who travel a lot will probably remember those paper surveys. Originally , some of the original metrics around voice of the customer and nps. And I’ve spent a lot of my career as well in data and analytics which you know, predictive analytics platform, social media analytics, and a lot of that really comes together here in my role at Genesys. I actually joined to lead our AI function which is a lot of our predictive engagement, predictive routing capabilities, our conversational ai platform, so being able to build out our bots and agent-assist. And in my current role I actually have the pleasure now of lading our product marketing function. So, really taking all of that amazing technology and talking to our customers about what that all means, why it’s important, why we need to consider innovation. Things like AI, things like orchestration, things like proactive and predictive engagement. And that’s where, you know, the acquisitions that we’re going to be talking about today, fit in so perfectly to some of that innovation and that experience that we’re looking to bring our customers.
TheCustomer
It really does look like, if you take a look at your acquisitions and what you’re building, that Genesys is kind of creating its own customer ecosystem which is no small thing. Because as you know it’s a very complex – exciting – but complex thing to do. Let’s talk a little bit about the entities – about Pointilist and Exceed AI – who they are, why you felt, as the voice of Genesys, that they were such important acquisitions at this moment in time?
Elcenora Martinez
Yeah, let’s talk about Pointilist first. Pointilist is an incredible company – they’ve done such an amazing job around orchestration and customer journey visualization and from a thought leadership perspective, it’s a company that I’ve actually been following for quite some time because they have such amazing content and they do a really great job educating customers as to why all of these sources of data and visualizing the journey is so critical. So, I could not be more excited about the possibility of them joining Genesys.
We look at orchestration in a couple of different ways. We can look at data orchestration. We can look at workflow orchestration. And why Pointilist is such an exciting acquisition is because they are increasing the depth of the data available for us. So, because Genesys owns a lot of the customer conversation today, those voice interactions – a lot of those digital interactions but as you alluded to, it’s a complex base and being able to look at data across crm systems, cdp systems – a lot of this data that enriches how and what we know about customers to provide a better more personalized experience Pointilist is right in the middle of that. So it increases the data formats, the types of data that we are going to ingest into the platform so really exciting about how that rounds out some of our orchestration capabilities.
TheCustomer
I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Pointilist platform in action. I’ve interacted a little bit with those folks and and i don’t say this lightly and I certainly don’t say this often because I interact with a lot of different technologies out there – I’m completely blown away by their approach and their ability to pull complex interactions down into understandable, digestible and actionable ways that that non-technologists could really understand and make use of completely revolutionized. I’ve had so many conversations where I haven’t been able to mention them by name because the competitive nature of some of this, but just to look at the way they’ve done things is really, really impressive.
Elcenora Martinez
Yeah, they have such powerful journey visualization tools and you know one of the things that I love about working in a lot of these innovation areas is finding ways to simplify the complexity.
TheCustomer
So, if we can shift just a little bit and talk about Exceed AI and I have to confess I know far less about Exceed than Ido about Pointilist but it looks like a really interesting acquisition, as i said, in building your customer engagement ecosystem – another node on that big solar system. if you will.
Elcenora Martinez
So, Exceed is a conversational platform and it has a virtual assistant that works alongside the sales and marketing teams. And you know, a caveat by saying conversational platform meaning a number of different things. In this particular case, they’re very focused on the ability to qualify, nurture and follow up with leads, so it is an excellent tool for some of the inside sales sdr’s, bdrs, doing some of that prospecting. And what’s exciting about the acquisition of Exceed for Genesys is that it gives us the opportunity to combine it with a couple of other sets of offerings most notably from our Bold360 acquisition recently, an offering called Acquire which allows us to do outbound prospecting. And you heard me talk a little bit about predictive engagement in terms of that web experience. So now you start looking at this technology around that lead nurture prospecting with the ability to do outbound prospecting and this engagement, and it becomes a really powerful solution of capabilities for us to go into that sales and marketing space.
TheCustomer
Beyond what these acquisitions mean for Genesys – which is going to be really interesting – let’s talk for a moment about what you see happening industry-wide. You know, what does CX look like now versus what it will look like in two or three years? And the point of that would be, maybe, to give our listeners and readers a heads-up as to what you see that they should be paying attention to.
Elcenora Martinez
Yeah, this is such an exciting conversation because there are so many possibilities. There’s a lot of the convergence around the data that is driving the lines between service and sales to continue to come together in a way that we really are grounded in the experience. And you’ll hear me talk about that I think that one of the most important things companies can do today is think about the experience that they want for their customers and work backwards. Because then the starting point isn’t “do we have the right data, are we targeting the right customers?” The experience is working your way backwards and it’s a lot easier to break down some of those silos between sales and marketing with that lens.
Genesys recently did a survey of 11,000 consumers – It’s we call “the Connected Customer Experience” and as part of that, one of the stats that I thought was specifically, you know, important is that 70% of customers say that a brand is only as good as its service and then a third of that say that most of the time it’s a hassle. And so, working your way backwards, it allows you to think about breaking down those silos as part of that connected customer experience.
Another one of the stats that I found particularly interesting is that 59% of companies send non-sales related communication. So I find that some of the trends are that companies need to earn that right to sell. And again, I think that’s where really thinking about sales and service together, personalization-proactive, those non-sales related types of communications are really going to force a convergence around marketing technology, around CRM data, around what you’re looking for in that customer experience.
TheCustomer
I feel like that’s always been the end goal of so much of the technological innovations over the past, say, five to seven years. You know, everybody’s been talking about omni-channel and a 360-degree view of a customer. But I feel like this is probably the moment in time when that could actually become possible.
Elcenora Martinez
I agree and I also think that the innovation that you think about from a technology standpoint right, modern cloud platforms are making it a lot easier to have those integrations on the data elements that matter right back to why Pointilist is such an exciting acquisition. It isn’t about bringing in the entire CRM data. It’s about bringing in the data that informs the experience that complements or that completes what you need for your customers. And so those APIs, microservices – again modern architecture – makes it a lot more possible to be agile in those types of projects as opposed to embarking on something that’s a major, major data transformation.
TheCustomer
Elcenora, thanks so much for your time. I really love having these kinds of conversations because we’re talking about things that are not only fascinating but important. And today I can talk with somebody who’s actually implementing them. So. thank you for your time!
Elcenora Martinez
No, thank you, Mike. My pleasure.
