Brand Embassy (discontinued) vs. Genesys PureConnect (discontinued)

Though the strengths I listed in the prior question are really hopeful, the negatives outweigh the positives so much that at this time I could not in good conscience recommend this product. I really hope those issues improve - if they do, this would be a really strong tool for a customer service-based company like ours. Particularly one with so many people working remotely. For now, I'm honestly thankful I was able to take a different position here in which I never plan to touch NICE again.

Incentivized

CIC is best suited for business models that rely on heavily leverage Data Integration especially one like ours that require real-time and high-speed data access for billing and customer integration. CIC is not well suited for small organizations < 50 where they are only answering phones in the course of doing business VS. the business is the phone.

• Easy to understand and use interface with detailed perks for responding, evaluating and tracking user feedback.
• Excellent and easy to generate reports with lots of relevant data for day-to-day operations.
• Agent performance and team management.
• Easily measurable KPIs thanks to detailed reporting.
• Use of tags and sentiment help make analysis of customer behavior easier.

• Purely Software Based System: On Microsoft OS. It is an all software-based system making it easy to manage, integrate and interface with other systems
• One Vendor: All modules, IVR, ACD, Dialer, WFM are from one vendor. So, no compatibility and latency issues at all.
• Superb Notifier Service: You don't have to restart any process or service for a change to take effect.

Incentivized

• In terms of reports that we get from Brand Embassy, it would be great to have information about the number of cases, or conversations that we have with our customers. At the moment, we have just info about number of interactions and the total workload.
• There are options to tag every conversation, in order to track why our customers contact us. Their tag menu is a bit too small, it would be great if it was larger.

• Licensing can be challenging and very expensive.
• Client templates are hard to administer and are built very different than the rest of the functionality.
• Web desktop has been slow to come along and include all the features.
• Optimizer is very sub-par product.

Incentivized

I still use the platform: - its use is customer friendly - improves and speed up customer care on SM - improves speed and quality of internal processes/communication - monitor/measure all valuable metrics

We are so embedded on Pure Connect that we like to progress with it. For instance, we are looking into ways to provide different solutions to our customers, help our business to succeed, and work in a better CX.

One of the biggest advantages is that all is in one platform.

Incentivized

Please see all other details from previous answers in this survey.

Incentivized

The interface is only semi user-friendly on almost every front. Agent experience is lacking and we have found many limitations within the system. Workforce forecasting is not as robust as expected. Quality continues to be a struggle. Interaction searches are not robust.

Incentivized

The application itself uses a hub and spoke model that can help isolate errors in one section of the application from the rest, creating a much more stable overall program. Of all of the outages that we've had with our contact center platform, I can count on one hand how often it was truly a Genesys issue rather than a network issue, server issue or issue with a platform relied upon for an integration (web services, db calls).

Incentivized

Some of the client applications take a bit of time on initial load, but with the move towards web based applications that issue is alleviated. You can tell that effort really isn't putting into the desktop apps any longer and that the client development effort is being put into bringing Interaction Connect closer to feature parity with the desktop (and bringing wholly new features to Connect). As far as IVR operations, web service calls, database operations: they all operate reasonably.

Incentivized

It is difficult to describe just how awesome the support guys and gals at Brand Embassy are. Ever-present and eager to help, with kind and helpful attitude and you can really feel they are doing this to help you make results

Some cases are resolved quickly others are taking longer and the reseller sometimes has to chase support several times and explain the issue seen several times. While being a direct customer before, I recognise this and it seems that when a case moves to another engineer they don’t read the previous case notes or don’t understand what has been done. This, from a customers perspective, slows down resolution times.

Incentivized

I liked the setup of the whole class. The instructor knew the topic well enough to answer questions from entry level to a more advanced one.

Instructor encouraged participation of the whole class and was able to engage every one. Also provided "real live" examples so everyone can relate to it.

Incentivized

The online training itself is good. You are provided resources and can self study to a certain point, but the pacing always felt off. Either snails pace or like trying to drink from a fire hose. I think this easily could have had to do with course material and my personal preparations, though. I would say my main gripe is that since the acquisition the team responsible for actually booking training is very unresponsive and often not knowledgeable about the courses they offer. Booking my last training was a real chore.

Incentivized

Don't try to go the perfect solution as a first target. Work on answer the more needs with a simple solution. Then analyse and try again to answer the most needs with adding a bit if complexity only if require. No needs to customise straight from the beginning or deployment takes too long.

Generally I don't see huge differences between social CRM tools - it's mainly in the details of how well it's implemented and connected to your channels. For example other tools cannot easily process non-standard channels like custom made forums or have a e-mail based ticketing for private follow ups. Brand Embassy shines in this area.

Call Manager, you had to buy all the components that are out of the box for PureConnect. The licensing model is more expensive on the Cisco side vs the Genesys PureConnect side. Lastly was on the Cisco side since you have to connect/integrate all the components on the cisco side you have to have so many vendors to install those parts. This drives the cost up even more so it was not worth going that route for our organization.

Genesys PureConnect's core and adjunct model allows for fairly easy growth in satellite locations via off site session managers, remote located media servers, remote content servers, etc to allow you to spread the infrastructure out while not pushing as much network traffic to your core data centers.

Incentivized

• The first year when we started to focus on social care, we received 736 mentions. 4 years later we are dealing with 725, 942 mentions per year without the necessity to hire more people into our social care team. The seven of them are still able to respond to our customers very quickly and with high quality. And we believe that Brand Embassy is the key to our success in social care. Thanks to this tool we can simply manage such a big amount of mentions and questions.

• We're improving our CX by optimizing our call centers, using additional attributes and keys to identify the best rep for the job.
• We are also streamlining the journey of each individual customer by using PureConnect as the central interface for omnichannel interactions, allowing us to pick up the conversation where we left off.
• Using additional attributes that start with the contact center interaction, we're able to track a student journey and proactively step in - increasing our individualized support to focus on the student outcome.