Genesys Acquires Social Customer Care Provider Solariat

Customer experience and contact center solutions company Genesys has acquired Solariat, a social customer care and analytics platform provider. According to a statement from Genesys, the acquisition will allow the company to extend its social media engagement capabilities by enabling its client organizations to deliver "world-class" customer experience.

Solariat's main solution, its SocialOptimizr tool, is designed to manage high volume social media interactions and determine which interactions require a customer service agent's attention. "Today's customer experience leaders face a daunting task in trying to understand what their customers are saying in the social sphere, and what to do about it," Paul Segre, president and chief executive officer at Genesys, said in a statement. With Solariat's SocialOptimizr, Genesys is trying to address the challenge. "Combining Solariat's patented social analytics technology with the Genesys Customer Engagement Platform will give Genesys customers a powerful new tool to deliver accurate and consistent answers across all customer touchpoints, including social media," Segre added.

As part of the Genesys Customer Experience Platform, the tool will identify what's driving a customer to reach out to a brand through social media and assign that customer interaction an action-ability score to calculate what type of response is needed and how quickly that response should be delivered. This is crucial for improving customer experience, because more than 47 percent of social media users engage in social media customer care, according to Natalie Petouhoff, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. "Customers are adopting different support channels faster than some companies are, and social media is one these important channels," Petouhoff said in a Genesys Web event today.

To prioritize social media interactions based on the action-ability score, SocialOptimizr uses proprietary filtering technology that not only determines which messages are more urgent, but also learns over time, improving its filters and applying smart tags on posts or tweets to strengthen social listening capabilities, report missed conversations, and continue to build the SocialOptimizr knowledge base. The tool also allows for deep customization, giving users an unlimited set of criteria to determine how social media interactions should be routed and reported.

For Genesys, the acquisition is a much needed step in the right direction, and a promising move toward strengthening its social support offerings. "Social media definitely matters, and it's an important tool for self-service support," Petouhoff says. "When it comes to social media, I think the one-nine-ninety rule really puts it into perspective: if only one percent of customers are posting about you through social media, then nine percent are responding to posts, and ninety percent are reading. That ninety percent is big—these people may be lurkers just observing in the background, but they can make a major business difference," she adds.

Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, echoes this sentiment. "SocialOptimizr gives Genesys more gravitas in the key area of real-time social listening and responding—a key area for contact centers. We will have to see if this was more than an IP play, but this is certainly a good addition of capability for Genesys customers," he adds.

Once the deal is complete, Solariat's artificial intelligence capabilities will be fully integrated with Genesys' Customer Experience Platform, and the company's SocialOptimizr solution will be fully integrated with the Genesys Agent Desktop.

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