Genesys, a leading cloud CX solution provider, recently announced its acquisition of Radarr, a social listening and engagement company with offices in Singapore and Bangalore, India. With this strategic move, Genesys will enable companies to unify the omnichannel experience offerings and improve customer experience (CX) outcomes.

As per the Digital 2023 Global Statshot report from We are Social and Meltwater, consumers spend approximately 2 hours and 24 minutes daily, or around 10% of their day, on social media, representing about 15% of their waking hours. Beyond communication, entertainment, and news consumption, social media has become vital for customers to connect with companies for services and share their CX feedback. Thus, ignoring social media as a channel is no longer an option when creating a comprehensive customer experience.

While many companies have social media messaging apps as part of their customer service channels, the full potential of delivering exceptional CX through improved listening, engagement, and conversation management on social media remains untapped.

Social media listening, monitoring, and interaction management tools occupy the intersection of marketing and customer service, where vendors fall into three categories:

1. Niche players like Brandwatch, Konnect Insights, Sprinklr, and Meltwater specialise in social listening and engagement.
2. Marketing automation tools include HubSpot, HootSuite, Salesforce Marketing & Service Cloud.
3. CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) providers like NICE, Genesys, Talkdesk, and Five9, among others, have traditionally focused on incorporating social media messaging apps into their omnichannel CX suites.

Niche players offer deeper product features and broader coverage in social media monitoring and engagement space. In contrast, CCaaS vendors include social media messaging apps as part of their omnichannel offerings without social listening capabilities for broader trends and insights. To achieve seamless customer service across all channels, companies will need to invest in CCaaS solutions to empower their contact centres with voice and digital capabilities, such as social media messaging. Simultaneously, marketing teams utilise social listening tools to enhance campaign effectiveness.

Leveraging social media insights and sentiments during service transactions can significantly enhance the customer experience. Here, agents can be better informed of the customers’ specific challenges, respond to escalated issues quickly and be aware of related trends being reported on social channels. Achieving this involves partnerships and integrations between CCaaS providers and specialised social media management players. However, integration may not always be straightforward due to existing data integration challenges faced by companies striving to deliver an omnichannel experience.

The acquisition of Radarr and its integration into the Genesys CX suite empowers companies to offer a more personalised and differentiated customer experience. Additionally, Genesys gains access to AI-powered multilingual sentiment models that can detect the top 10 languages spoken globally, regional slang, and several Asian languages. This builds a strong differentiation for Genesys, especially in the Asia Pacific region.

While the contact centre is pivotal to customer service, exceptional CX requires a concerted, organisation-wide effort. In Twimbit’s framework, we recommend forming cross-functional teams as a key step. Genesys’ acquisition of social media listening and interaction management capabilities aligns with this approach, enabling companies to prepare better for their journey to exceptional CX. This enables marketing and customer service teams to collaborate seamlessly for higher levels of customer engagement, resulting in memorable and exceptional experiences.

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