Ensure Customer Satisfaction Through Efficient Implementation
The Avtex implementation team are the folks behind the scenes that work with our Project Managers to accomplish a work of art in Genesys Cloud – unique to each customer and installation. They are a group that dedicates endless hours to each project, putting on the polish and shine to ensure that each deployment is a success for their team, our clients, and their customers – creating great customer experiences all around.
The people behind the scenes do what they do so as an organization we can do the things we do. They make sure everything is exactly right, so we don’t have to worry about whether a project will be successful and whether our client’s needs will be satisfied.
At Avtex, our implementation team takes all the promises of sales, the scope of the solution consultants, and the expectations of the customer - creating a masterpiece, and delivering on time, in scope, and under budget.
Our Senior Director of Innovation Architects, Robert Wakefield-Carl, sat down with our Director of CX Engage Cloud Development Services, Anthony Gilio, to talk about what it takes to stand up, program, develop, install, and train so many installations a week and do it each and every time with satisfied customers.
[Robert] I know we have worked on many projects where you needed some extra eyes on a problem or some creative way to carry out some technological magic, but what is your normal installation process and what makes it so successful for our customers?
[Anthony] You bet we have! Normally, we follow the installation process, adhere to the scope, and deliver what was promised. I think it starts with that hand-off between the sales team and our team where we learn about the customer, what really matters to them, and what aspects of Genesys Cloud they desired, that caused them to purchase it in the first place. We get to ask about the details that the scope may have missed so we can adjust expectations or find ways to fit it in and the team gets together to discover what will make each and every product a success.
[Robert] I have been in some of these projects and cannot express how much we appreciate you explaining what does and does not work in those situations so we can make the front-end sale process even better.
[Anthony] It’s not so much that things are missed, it is usually that the perception of the sales team and customer are from the demo or documentation, not actual implementation. So we try to tie it all together into a vision of completeness and usefulness – usually suggesting ways to accomplish the same ends with alternative approaches.
Our team has specialists in many areas like programmers, developers, business analysts, trainers, and others that all bring their own ingredient to the pot so make the best stew around. The scope of work is analyzed, torn apart, divvied out and set upon by each of them so that we can accomplish simultaneous work on the project which also allows our team to work on multiple projects since we don’t have to work linearly on just one.
[Robert] I know we have been working on automation tools as well with Genesys Cloud that enables faster programming and implementation over our competition. Can you share some of those?
[Anthony] There is no secret there! The entire Genesys Cloud platform is written on an API and we just make use of that to transform the workbook the customer supplies with all the programming information into a pre-populated Genesys Cloud environment, ready for call flow design, customization, and customer personalization – that shaves off many hours that used to be spent adding queues, users, roles, and others.
With the new Architect tools, we are exploring import of common flows that can fit the needs of most companies with some quick editing and then get them up and running for testing and training as we finish out the instance. As the pace of sales increases, this back-end automation will be tantamount to our success in keeping up demands for bigger, faster, and better internal customer service.
[Robert] What are some of the real challenges that the implementation team faces?
[Anthony] This is an easy one – expertise. We have a great staff, but we need more engineers willing to learn all aspects of the product and be ready to produce creative solutions to meet customer demands. It takes long hours and dedication to get the product in just the right shape for the customer to go live and we are expecting it to be 100% from the start. We are always training, but Genesys is always innovating, so we must keep up with them to make sure we fully understand the features or new technologies as they come out so we can implement them for our customers.
[Robert] What about some of the problems you have faced with the implementations you have been part of.
[Anthony] We always get a bunch of requests from the customer or ideas that guys like you come up with that we have to bring to reality. I think the hardest is making that square peg fit into that circle. We need customers to understand that sometimes you just cannot do things the way they used to on the new system and then it is our job to find that better way of doing the same thing with as little disruption, so process matches the technology.
