New York, August / SPEECHTEK, 19, 2008 - Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc., an Alcatel-Lucent company (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) today announced software that significantly improves the customer experience by aligning self- and assisted service, and integrating voice across all customer service environments through open standards. Genesys Voice Platform (GVP) 8, unveiled at SpeechTEK, marks a major new release of Genesys’ market-leading software platform for interactive voice response (IVR).

GVP 8 is significant because it acts as an integrated platform that ends the standalone nature of voice self service. It is tightly integrated with both Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and the intelligent Customer Front Door (iCFD) solutions from Genesys and its partners. iCFD is an industry-wide initiative to transform the experience for customers entering the “telephone front door” of enterprises and break down self-service as a silo by leveraging key applications and business rules.

GVP 8 further leverages voice in customer service by tightly integrating key technologies such as SIP, web integration, and voice security software, as well as providing a single development environment for contact centers that use the Genesys Customer Interaction Management (CIM) platform.

“GVP is a very important element of our overall strategy,” said Paul Segre, President and CEO, Genesys, “because it brings to the forefront the convergence of all the technologies that touch customer service. Along with our CIM platform, GVP has led the transformation away from silos and ‘point solutions’ towards a more holistic approach to customer care.”

“In the present ‘down economy’ we’re not seeing companies abandon customer service to focus on cost containment. Instead we’re seeing companies invest in technologies that help to lower costs, but also improve customer service and personalization – either in self assistance, live assistance or both,” said Drew Kraus, Research Vice President, Gartner.  

“We’re seeing an increased investment in newer generation software-based IVRs that integrate much more tightly to both customer data in CRM software packages as well as to real-time contact queuing and routing engines.”

Several leading industry experts commented on the significance of GVP 8 as an indicator of important industry trends:

“Genesys has succeeded in combining its scale assets and partnerships to create and amplify the value of its GVP 8 platform,” said Daniel Hong, Lead Analyst of Customer Interaction Technologies at Datamonitor. “GVP 8 is an integrated software layer that leverages the large investment and focus enterprises have put into CRM, the web and business rules engines over the past several years. What’s interesting is that Genesys is leading with innovative applications and partnerships in its release of GVP 8 rather than the usual vendor messaging around new features and functions.”

“Today's customer-focused enterprises look for technology platform providers who work well with partners and support rapid deployment in multi-vendor environments,” said Dan Miller, sr. analyst at Opus Research. “Genesys successfully knit together the partner-friendly attributes of two leading voice platforms, and attracted an “A” List of application developers and integrators.”

Some of the key features of GVP 8 include:

• Built-in integration for the intelligent Customer Front Door (iCFD)
  The iCFD is a transformative solution bundle, focused specifically on improving the customer experience. By using information from back end systems, call center resources and customer preferences, the iCFD intelligently directs the call to the best service, whether self or assisted. It extracts these business routing strategies into one central location which allows the business owners to decide where and how to deliver the best service.
• GVP 8 supports mature open-standards of voice self-service platform
  It supports virtually all key open standards and critical applications including VXML, CCXML, SIP, VoIP, IP PBXs, gateways and softswitches, virtual hold technology, video applications, security and voice biometrics, and open compatibility with virtually any major third-party hardware and software.
• GVP 8 has built-in SIP support GVP 8 leverages Genesys integrations and SIP Server to connect to more VoIP environments than any other platform, including Alcatel-Lucent, Nortel CS2k, Avaya, Cisco CCM, Siemens 8000, Audiocodes, Paraxip, Cisco Gateways, Open IN, and others.
• Multi-tenancy for large enterprises and service providers
  For software as a service and managed service providers, GVP 8 supports mutitenancy, where several businesses can share a common platform and access it from virtually anywhere.
• Integrated Development Environment “Composer” GVP 8 has a unique development console that streamlines application development. GVP now provides a single unified development environment for customer interaction management. Developers and customers can quickly create routing strategies, and leverage business rules that gather relevant information such as back-end data or workflow to control the process and understand the context of a call.
• Common Platform for Both GVP and Voice Genie Customers
  Genesys has provided a single common next-generation platform that brings together its two key voice platform lines – Voice Genesys and GVP onto a single system.

About Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc.
Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company, is the only company that focuses 100 percent on software to manage customer interactions over the phone, Web and in e-mail. The Genesys software suite dynamically connects customers with the right resources - self-service or assisted service - to fulfill customer requests, optimize customer care goals and efficiently use resources. Genesys software directs more than 100 million customer interactions every day for 4,000 companies and government agencies in 80 countries. These companies and agencies can leverage their entire organization, from the contact center to the back office, to improve the overall customer experience. As a result, Genesys helps stop customer frustration, drive efficiency and accelerate business innovation. For more information, go to http://www.genesyslab.com or visit the industry blog at http://www.betterinteractions.com