Genesys Further Ventures into the Cloud with Ventriloquist Acquisition
Genesys, a provider of customer experience and contact center solutions, has acquired Ventriloquist Voice Solutions International, a Canadian firm that provides on-demand, interactive, cloud-based, multichannel customer communications solutions. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The Ventriloquist acquisition brings additional scale and reach to the Genesys cloud-based proactive communications offerings, which help companies to deliver persona-based, branded customer interactions over voice, text, email, and mobile to improve the customer experience. Ventriloquist, which is based in Mississauga, Ontario, is an existing partner of Genesys and has customers in the United States and Canada. Its customers span the financial services, telecommunications, retail, utility, education, media and entertainment, government, healthcare, transportation, travel, and hospitality industries.
The Ventriloquist solution will be rolled into the Genesys Proactive Customer Communications solution set, which delivers cloud-based mobile marketing, payments, collections, and other proactive customer service solutions to enterprises. Today, Genesys Proactive Customer Communications delivers more than 2 billion messages annually in 30 countries for 350 firms.
By acquiring Ventriloquist, Genesys brings additional scale and technical expertise to its proactive communications solution. This is Genesys' fifth acquisition in 12 months, with the majority of these, like Ventriloquist, focused on cloud customer experience. The others were EchoPass, SoundBite Communications, Angel, and Utopy.
"Customer experience leaders worldwide are looking for more and more ways to personalize proactive customer communications that eliminate the need for unnecessary customer interactions," said Reed Henry, chief marketing officer at Genesys, in a statement. "Genesys Proactive Customer Communications solutions allow customers to receive information in their preferred manner and only when needed, which makes them more likely to be a vocal advocate and promoter."
Sheila McGee-Smith, president and principal analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics, sees a trend forming where Genesys seems to be going after the persona-based interactions market. Its earlier acquisition of Brazilian firm LM Sistemas would support this trend, she suggests.
"LM Sistemas also delivered those kinds of solutions," she says. "It's interesting that [Genesys is] going deeper in that particular solution."