Interaction - George Aprane, VP, Channels and Alliances, Genesys

George Aprane, VP, Channels and Alliances, Genesys talks to us about his channel strategies.

Role of channel with services and cloud business becoming the core business?

George Aprane - At Genesys, we have witnessed a spike in cloud adoption, with businesses increasingly investing in cloud-based software. In India, we have relied heavily on our partners to drive a major part of our growth story as they are our backbone to deliver hyper-personalised experiences to our customers. We have seen the traditional reseller network evolve to become an ecosystem consisting of Resellers, Independent Software Vendors (ISV), Global System Integrators (GSI), and consultants.

Partners are constantly innovating to improve their stickiness with the customer. Like other SaaS offerings, Genesys partners tend to lead with a Land, Adopt, Expand and Renew model.

• During the Land phase, partners provide cloud ecosystem services that integrate Genesys Cloud CX to other IT sub-systems like Customer Relationship Management (CRM), ticketing, analytics, quality management, and recording systems.
• In the Adopt and Expand phase, Partners provide CX business adoption and optimisation services to advise customers on call routing optimisation, Bot optimisation, speech analytics, outbound campaign management, etc.

Then there are consulting partners who offer CX strategy and advisory services that align to the customers’ digitisation strategy.

From a Genesys standpoint, we are focussed on building an ecosystem of partners that will include transacting AND non-transacting partners. Partner Managers in Genesys are eco-system orchestrators, who team up with a network of partners, to create value across the entire customer lifecycle.

How different is the Indian market compared to other global markets?

George Aprane - India is a complex market to crack which has some unique regulatory requirements. All CCaaS solutions in India need to be compliant with Indian regulatory regulations relating to local private branch exchange (PBX) for domestic call ingress and no toll bypass. Call Detail Records (CDRs) and recording need to be stored and available in the country.

Post-Covid, the demand for cloud contact centre services has gone up significantly, especially with hybrid work culture becoming the new normal. Given the Indian regulatory framework, there is a compelling need to deliver business requirements locally with the right value proposition to enterprise customers. The Genesys Cloud CX architecture strategy is designed to address this regulatory challenge and build a seamless local cloud service.

Genesys is at the epicentre of a robust and expanding ecosystem, which includes relationships with industry titans like AWS, Google Cloud, Zoom and Adobe. We also have a network of system integrators who use our technology to help customers achieve their business goals. We are able to support our customers on their digital transformation journey and help them move their current legacy infrastructure to the cloud

Emerging opportunities for channel partners in India with respect to Genesys products?

George Aprane - India is one of the top BPO hubs for a vast majority of organisations globally, thus making it one of the most promising markets for Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) companies. In a rapidly changing business environment where businesses are striving to become loyalty leaders, the experience economy is shaping technology and redefining CX; and CX is acknowledged as the new battleground - where customers tie the experience to brand perception. Businesses want a unified customer experience management platform that spans both internal teams and customer channels and cuts across functions to break down data, organisational and customer management silos. Partners play a huge role as we strive to help businesses to better collaborate and integrate customer data, improve real-time CX orchestration and gain competitive advantage by extending benefits to customers, employees, and the business.

Channel trends for 2023 and beyond

George Aprane - It all starts with the customer. Customers have gone mainstream with subscription and SaaS. They prefer to consume software and technology via subscription, and the software tends to be deployed on the cloud (i.e., SaaS).

We are witnessing this changing customer consumption model drive transformations in the way vendors reward partners too. In the old world of perpetual license sales, resellers got recognised and rewarded for collecting the order. In the SaaS world, we see partner programs evolving to a point where vendors recognise and reward partners at the “point of value” versus rewarding partners at the point of sale. Recognising and rewarding the partner at the “point of value” entails a significant change across the ecosystem. In order to get the recognition, partners will need to acquire new set of skills to sell differently, and vendors will need to tweak their software bundles, back-end systems, and partner programs to accomplish the same.

Also, changing consumption models require multiple “new partner types” to address a wider range of buyers. Vendors are looking to build advantage by creating loosely coupled networks or ecosystems, and these ecosystems are larger and more diverse than a traditional set of bilateral partnerships. By leveraging ecosystems, vendors can deliver complex solutions while focusing on providing value.

In the meanwhile, marketplaces continue to evolve too. It is estimated that around 15%-20% of the B2B spending is already flowing through marketplaces. Some of it represents the digitisation of traditional channels too! From a Genesys standpoint, during our fiscal year 2022, we saw an increase of more than 35% year-over-year in the number of partners in our AppFoundry Marketplace and more than 50% of new cloud bookings were influenced by partners. For our partner community, the ongoing transition to digital and cloud services will remain a top priority. We jointly deliver on the principle of orchestrating individualised and empathetic experiences at every consumer touchpoint.

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