Genesys Acquires Utopy
Customer service and contact center solutions provider Genesys is acquiring Utopy, a provider of workforce optimization solutions, including speech and text analytics and voice of the customer applications, for an undisclosed amount.
Genesys said the acquisition accelerates its delivery of a complete workforce optimization (WFO) solution and strengthens its integrated suite of contact center applications. The company's previous WFO offerings largely involved technologies it licensed from Zoom.
With the addition of Utopy, Genesys now offers a complete WFO suite, including workforce management, speech and text analytics, performance management, coaching and training, surveys, and quality management.
The acquisition also brings to Genesys Utopy's SpeechMiner solution, which helps companies optimize contact center performance by automatically assessing and retrieving customer interactions over multiple channels, including voice, email, chat, and social media. Web-based dashboards enable ongoing visibility across all channels and agents.
"One of the areas we know we needed was interaction analytics," says Eric Tamblyn, vice president of global innovations at Genesys. "It's really exciting for us from a customer impact standpoint. Genesys has a lot of really good information around customer interactions and cross-channel conversations, and that's an important part of our strategy. What Utopy brings to this is like missing DNA."
Tamblyn says companies will now be able to derive meaning from conversations. "You will see literally everything that the customer is experiencing," he says.
Genesys also adds customer interaction analytics to help companies search all interactions for key terms, critical business topics, and customer sentiment, identify those that need immediate action, and then route the customer to the optimal agent, back-office worker or manager for resolution.
Built on the Genesys Customer Interaction Management Platform, the newly enhanced Genesys WFO solution is part of the company's integrated suite of contact center applications.
"Utopy's solutions will leverage our quality management installation that we already have in place, and over time they will be integrated into our suite," says Tamblyn. "Customers already invested in Genesys will have the ability to access world class analytics, and we will continue to invest in the Utopy platform."
The acquisition has implications beyond workforce optimization, says Dan Miller, founder and senior analyst at Opus Research.
"[The acquisition] demonstrates Genesys' commitment to supporting better customer experience," Miller says. "Analytics play an important role in rapid detection of a customer's intent, and by acquiring one of the specialists in speech analytics Genesys can integrate resources to support more conversational customer care."
Genesys just yesterday released its 2012 financials, for the first full year since it was sold off by Alcatel-Lucent. During the year, it experienced double-digit growth, with more than $610 million in revenue.
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