The News:
Genesys has introduced a new solution using a fresh and research-driven methodology to measure experience in a way that ties it more closely to action and purpose. Historic ways of experience measurement often miss the mark in finding what truly matters to the individual, resulting in data points that are not actionable. The Experience Index is a survey-based engagement that is personalized to measure employee experience and deliver the targeted and business process-improvement insights that organizations are looking for.

The Experience Index uses a people-first patent-pending scoring engine developed through research conducted to really understand the audience – what truly matters to the entire agent experience, and how much does that factor matter as part of the experience.

The engagement is a 6-week process consisting of an in-depth personalized requirements review where the appropriate data filters are looked at, and demographics are reviewed to make sure the appropriate cohorts and employee populations are sampled. Genesys’ own survey tool is used, and dashboards are created with the incoming data anonymized. Part of this dashboard offers benchmarking data to see how a company’s data compares to others in the industry. A targeted plan of action is then crafted, offering a roadmap to improve problem areas.

The first Experience Index offering focuses on the contact center agent and can drill down to the individual sub-experiences that make up the entire contact center employee customer journey. The solution is in limited release. At initial launch it will be available in North America and EMEA through the Genesys Customer Success & Services team. See the full Genesys press release here.

Genesys Launches the Experience Index for Contact Center Employees

Analyst Take:

The Experience Index from Genesys offers a new way to measure experience, and one that seems to offer a closer tie to both increased employee experience and more solid business process improvements. There has been pushback on using Net Promoter Score (NPS) over the past few years. Vendors have been hearing it, and as an analyst, I have been hearing it from end users as well. It is simply not a very actionable data point for many companies, and it does not measure the end-to-end experience well.

This introduction ties into the Genesys focus on an empathic approach to contact center employees. “Genesys is pushing forward on our path towards more empathy and personalization for contact centers. This is a key piece to our personalization strategy and helps move us closer to making sure experience is truly rewarding for both customers as well as agents,” says Peter Graf, CSO, COO, Genesys.

“This is also a way to help improve business results and to drive customer retention at a time when it’s so easy to lose a customer and to drive employee retention when it’s hard to get people up to speed and to keep them over a long period of time,” says Graf.

The Experience Index offers a more people-focused approach to measurement with a lot of upfront research and effort going into the design of the scoring engine.

It is good to see the benchmarking capability as well, and the ability to slice and dice the data by understanding the cohorts that customers and employees belong to. You do not want to compare apples to oranges, and this measurement system can drill down to points such as agents that have a specific tenure, that work in a specific geography, and do a specific type of job.

Case Studies

Genesys walked through an example that demonstrated how going deeper into the data can result in uncovering information that might not have been able to be teased out before.

In a pilot with a customer, the company had a strategy that was rooted in digital, with the goal of diverting calls out of their IVR and into digital. They had been really focusing on this, which resulted in digital volume growing rapidly. The supporting teams had cohorts for various channels such as email, voice, and social media. When Genesys helped them run the Experience Index, those supporting social media had much lower measurements when compared to the benchmark. Those employees were also feeling overworked and not supported during on-boarding. This particular company also had attrition problems, so these issues really needed to be worked on, to assist with retention. The company could easily see that there was a staffing issue that needed to be addressed and that employees were feeling they did not have the resources they needed to help them in their jobs. Actionable data, providing support for a potential staff up, as well as the realization that learning and coaching tools would be beneficial.

Other Takeaways

• The company has had multiple pilots with customers in different verticals as well as with enterprise and mid-market companies. Genesys itself has been using the solution, uncovering some friction points that it was able to address.
• Genesys is clear about this being the first step in a larger rollout that will include CX in the future. As the offering scales globally, Genesys will be using its partner network as well
• Through the use of a third-party vendor, Genesys reached out to more than 23,000 employees and consumers across six industries. Seeing this data grow will help with the slice and dice approach, and Genesys confirmed the collection will be ongoing.
• Genesys recommends the process is done at least on an annual basis because the benchmarks do change year to year. It should not be one and done.
• Starting with agents makes sense, and fits in well with the Genesys strategy of agent support for better EX and CX. In the pilots, participation levels were high, with most being in the 80-90% range.
• It was good to see the link to actionable insights. In the pilots Genesys performed, there were 15+ improvement projects delivered. I also liked that the process could pinpoint solutions that companies did not have in place to assist in the improvement process, and I particularly liked how it could show the tie to underutilized solutions the company already had in place. For instance, perhaps they invested in gamification, but it was not being fully utilized (or utilized at all). Maybe the data showed people wanted more training and their skills and learning technologies were being underused. This helps make sure technology investment dollars get fully leveraged.