Genesys India’s Avanti Misra discusses key elements of a successful partner model
CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Avanti Misra, Director Partner Sales, Genesys India
- What are the key elements of Genesys’ partnership model that ensure a fair and transparent engagement, fostering a thriving and connected ecosystem?
At Genesys, we focus on building an ecosystem of diverse partners who help businesses orchestrate remarkable customer experiences. They are integral for the company as they are a major part of our growth story and the backbone for a wider market reach, business and growth strategy. We lead with a partner-first strategy with over 90% of India revenue and over 75% of APAC revenue coming from partners as of end FY’24.
Partner profitability is paramount to Genesys, and our goal is to help partners build long-term, predictable, and profitable businesses while ensuring customer success is never compromised. We prioritise and encourage partner specialisation and help them differentiate themselves by co-creating and driving complimentary services like process improvement audits, outcome-based consultancy, different consumption models, etc. These efforts enhance their profitability and support customer retention and loyalty.
The partner ecosystem is further managed and governed by a team of senior individuals who are responsible for the business strategy and growth of our partners. These partner leaders work collaboratively with sales and marketing to govern the rules of engagement, ensure transparent conversations, drive continuous enablement, work collaboratively on problem-solving and foster strategies to grow pipeline and business winnability for their focussed group.
Additionally, with the Genesys Ascend partner program, we aim to align credentials, performance criteria, and rewards with the “Land and Expand” theme in the Software as a Service (SaaS) Go-To-Market. The goal is to align partner incentives to emphasise SaaS value creation and business outcomes, equipping partners to capture incremental value. By incorporating these programs and practices in its partnership model, Genesys aims to create a fair and transparent engagement that fosters a thriving and connected ecosystem of partners, ultimately benefiting customers and driving business success.
2. What is your strategy to measure effectiveness?
Measuring the effectiveness of our partner strategy is crucial for assessing the success of our joint initiatives and ensuring alignment with Genesys’s business goals. Some of the practices we follow include:
- Defining Key Performance Indicators: Our entire partner program is a measure of rewarding partners for delivering on KPIs that promote SaaS business growth. These go beyond just revenue bookings to additional metrics like creating incremental business pipeline, investing in continuous enablement, driving solution adoption, etc to name a few.
- Monitor Sales and Revenue Metrics: This includes tracking sales performance and revenue generated through our respective partners and analysing trends over time to identify growth opportunities and areas of underperformance.
- Regular Reviews and Performance Discussions: We run monthly cadences and quarter business reviews to review progress, address challenges, and set objectives for improvement.
- Assessing Implementation Success: In the CX space, professional services/implementation is extremely important for the partner GTM. A partner’s subject matter expertise on the diverse scope of the CCAAS world takes priority over all other metrics. Hence assessing their use cases/success stories is a big measure of the partnerships’ success.
These measures ensure that our partners align with our business goals, drive continuous improvement, and foster successful partnerships through experience orchestration and delivering value for customers.
3. Does Genesys leverage data-driven insights to assess brand awareness? If so, then how?
Genesys actively leverages data-driven insights to assess brand awareness, employing various analytics and data visualisation tools, dashboards and methodologies to gauge audience sentiment, engagement levels, and brand sentiment across multiple platforms. Some of these include website analytics, email marketing metrics, customer surveys & feedback, brand and social media monitoring, market research, and competitive analysis amongst others.
From a partner perspective, we engage with all our partners for joint marketing and co-branding. Being top brands themselves – which include top Telcos, GSIs, VARs, Referral, and Co-sell partners. These organisations also replicate the Genesys effort and double up on assessing brand awareness, identifying areas for improvement, and refining our marketing strategies to increase visibility and engagement among target audiences.
- How significant is the role of Genesys’ R&D centers in India in driving innovation and maintaining competitiveness?
Our R&D centres in India are integral to driving innovation, and a substantial portion of our Indian workforce develops innovative and cutting-edge technology products for Genesys globally. Our R&D centres in India are spread across Chennai, Hyderabad, and Bangalore, with the Chennai R&D centre being the third largest for Genesys globally. The Indian market’s expanding AI sector has made it a top destination for talent, and we are committed to leveraging this technical talent to deliver exceptional customer orchestration. In this regard, our Chennai Centre of Excellence (CoE) has a mandate to develop innovative technologies around cloud and AI aimed at invigorating BPO businesses and accelerating contact centre transformation.
Furthermore, to stay ahead of our competition, our R&D centres have some highly skilled engineering talent that helps us achieve our vision of enabling organisations to orchestrate end-to-end, personalised experiences. These teams play an essential role in driving key initiatives like speech analytics, voice recognition, sentiment analysis, cloud and AI, which significantly contribute to our market-leading product portfolio and digital capabilities.
- What is the plan for Genesys to sustain and enhance its brand’s value proposition in 2024?
Genesys has been a key player in the industry for more than 30 years, and. we have assisted multiple organisations in powering their contact centres. Today, we have grown into a leading cloud company by expanding our portfolio and ecosystem to enable the next era of AI-powered end-to-end experience orchestration through our open, 100% cloud platform, Genesys CloudTM. With the power of our trusted, all-in-one Genesys Cloud platform, we help accelerate growth for organisations by enabling them to differentiate with the right customer experience at the right time, while driving stronger workforce engagement, efficiency and operational improvements.
Our brand value proposition is delivered through our platform’s capabilities and our market-leading, all-in-one CCaaS solution, Genesys Cloud CX that allows companies to deliver outstanding customer service, engage with customers in a personalised manner, and drive meaningful insights for continuous improvement. Using Genesys Cloud CX, organisations can reduce expenses and maximise loyalty by delivering empathetic, personalised experiences at scale for their customers and employees. As a result, currently, Genesys empowers more than 8000 organisations in over 100 countries, and leads the market in AI-powered Experience Orchestration by joining forces with our partner ecosystem which sets the pace in their respective industries.
In the next era of employee and customer experiences, we aim to provide valuable, real-time insights that inform C-suite decisions. To achieve this, we are advancing our single platform strategy anchored in experience orchestration, to create experiences that drive successful business outcomes for our customers.
