Teleperformance and Genesys Team Up to Deliver On-Demand Functionality

Citing market needs, particularly the current economic climate for businesses, contact center outsourcing giant Teleperformance and software provider Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories are teaming up to provide an on-demand hosted contact center offering, enabling clients of both vendors to quickly scale up as needed to satisfy an increasingly demanding customer base.

According to Matt Bieber, president of hosted contact center services for Teleperformance, the outsourcer sought to add a few more arrows to its customer service quiver. "They would typically have to build capabilities out based on their peak demand, but now they can size appropriately and flex it because of our relationship with Genesys," he says. "Many companies are divesting themselves of its information technology staff and seeking to pay from an operational expense perspective. The time is ripe to be in this space."

The two vendors have a long-standing relationship already, with Genesys spokesperson David Radoff estimating there are approximately 15,000 seats in North America alone already running some form of Genesys' offerings. Now, Teleperformance will also be able to offer Genesys' voice and multichannel routing and queuing, voice and Web self-service, queue management, computer telephony integration, workforce management, real-time monitoring, and reporting and analytics.

"It's a natural extension of having a business relationship on the customer side, and it was growth out of that leading to this partnership," adds Jeff Bennett, senior director of sales for Genesys.

Bieber is quick to point out Teleperformance has had some offerings in the hosted world for several years now, mainly involving interactive voice response. The partnership with Genesys enables his company to offer a wider array of on-demand offerings. "There will now be a full suite of capabilities in the hosted space," he says. "When you start to look at the compliment of this with agent capabilities ... it really does add stickiness to our relationship with clients."

Dan Miller, senior analyst at Opus Research, explains that the move has the potential to benefit both vendors. For Teleperformance, he says it can serve the Genesys user base as it "moves into this uncertain future where people have to do more with less." "For Genesys, a partnership with ostensibly the largest provider of outsourced contact center services -- with a global footprint -- is a very important channel to have," he adds.

In a statement, Daniel Hong, lead analyst for customer interaction technologies at Datamonitor, said the move "further validates the attractiveness and stickiness of the hosted contact center model in the enterprise market."

Miller echoes Hong's assessment, but points out that enterprise-sized contact centers have been utilizing on-demand technology for some time now, but just haven't been making it public. "It's something of a stealth phenomena among large enterprises, and the reason why some of the biggest global brands in the world don't make it public is because they don't want to say they are turning to third parties to handle their first-order customer care activity," he says. "But, they've been doing it. This is more common than people think."

Also, the partnership allows for clients unwilling to go fully on-premises or a hosted deployment to have a combination of the two -- a hybrid model. "Many large enterprises have pre-existing brick-and-mortar contact centers, and they tend to look to outsourcers for when call volumes are beyond capacity to handle on-premises," Miller says.

With the growing comfort with the software-as-a-service model, the hushed tones and reticence among large enterprises may start to change. "It's about time -- and a real credit to Teleperformance -- that there is a special program around Genesys' infrastructure," Miller says. "There's some pretty cool [capabilities] in terms of the pretreatment of calls and cross-channel support. I think this is going to benefit clients, and give the vendors a stronger presence by being offered both as a premises-based solution and in the cloud."

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