Genesys Cloud CX (formerly PureCloud, Genesys Cloud) is a contact center application optimized for automatic call distribution, interactive voice response, email, social media, chat, and text/SMS. It is also a VoIP interconnect service provider.
$75
per month (billed annually) per user
HCL Connections
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Connections from HCL Technologies (formerly from IBM, acquired by HCL in 2018) is a collaboration tool and employee digital workspace with key features like social analytics, blogs, document management, and a social network.
I liked the agent and skill based routing. As a business who have multiple brands and accounts, we usually have agents that are specific to certain brand with different priorities. So this feature has been specifically helpful to our business when routing them through phone, email and chat supports. It helps us generate high customer satisfaction ratings across channels
IBM Connections is well suited for larger organizations that need an internal social networking tool and are willing to deal with IBM and the complexity of the software. It is less appropriate for smaller organizations and those who don't want to deal with the complexity, or IBM's awful customer service and prices.
The plugin for MS Office/Explorer has made saving and sharing working documents extremely convenient for me and my close colleagues
The newsfeed feature conveniently aggregates updates from the communities/people you follow. It's nice not to have to jump from community to community to see what's going on in the organization
The various apps can be used for several purposes. A little creativity goes a long way when establishing what type of information the apps can be useful for communicating
The lack of a note-taking tool became a bigger and bigger issue as time went on. Our pilot users felt Connections was a natural place to take and share meeting notes – including photos, drawings, recorded audio, etc. – and were always frustrated that there was no easy, organized way to do that. We tried using a Blog, Wiki, etc. but nothing really resonated as a good solution for this.
The Wiki tool is weak, providing rigid structure but with few options. A Community can only have a single Wiki, for instance. Wikis are weak in the mobile app as well; they’re not even easy to navigate. Users ended up ignoring Wikis completely despite our efforts to get them to convert documents like guidelines, policies, procedures, handbooks, etc. into Wiki form.
The Windows Explorer plug-in was useful but required a lot of manual intervention to setup. For instance, once a user joins a Community in Connections, the Community also has to be manually added to the Explorer plug-in so the user can find, open and edit files with it. We felt this process should be much more automated.
Tagging is only relevant in the web UI and, to a lesser extent, in the mobile app. However, in the Windows Explorer plug-in, Tags are not usable at all making it difficult to find things that were easy to find in the web UI.
IBM Docs was not included in the on-premises deployment; it was an additional license so we did not test it. Documents, mainly Microsoft Office files, are still the single most common way our user community creates, shares, edits and presents information. That proved to be a major gap for our users, and slowed user adoption considerably. We considered testing it, but IBM Docs would only work for about half of our users so we found ourselves wondering if we really wanted to support two document editing platforms. IBM Docs also offers no way to work offline as far as we could tell. This also meant we would need to keep licensing Microsoft Office which is not cheap.
Consulting costs are high because the back-end environment is complex. Installing, administrating and even patching Connections is a fairly complex process. We needed to hire consultants to install our test environment and any major upgrades would’ve required additional consulting fees. Any 3rd party add-ons we looked at were highly technical in nature meaning…you guessed it, more consulting costs.
Administrating IBM Connections requires editing XML files in a specific, secure way that is typically done in a console. I love consoles as much as the next admin, but when you only use a console once every 2 months it means looking up all the documentation and re-educating yourself. A single change could take me 2 hours to implement. 3rd party admin dashboards do exist, at an additional cost, but IBM really should provide a much easier way to manage the environment.
The lack of in-person or online training courses, materials, videos, etc. really discouraged a lot of users. The only decent training we could find (marketing videos aside) was a single video series on Lynda.com which, of course, was an additional cost. In the end that video didn’t really help our users much beyond introductory concepts.
IBM includes reporting, but it’s a massive Cognos system requiring some serious hardware and Cognos expertise. We had neither, and would have ultimately opted for a 3rd party add-on for reporting and statistics.
An often overlooked concern is eDiscovery. Our contracted eDiscovery service extensively works with various ECMs, but had no idea how they would handle Connections data. The cloud version of Connections offers an add-on for eDiscovery, but as far as we could tell IBM offered nothing for on-premises deployments.
The upcoming upgrades working with Genesys Cloud and Salesforce are very exciting. Even though we don't use Genesys Cloud to the fullest extent it can be used (we just migrated a year ago), when these upgrades roll out, I am very excited to see what it can do to for our agents. I think they are going to be very impressed
Connections has continued to more than meet our needs from a collaboration point of view and we are currently working on integration with our IBM Websphere portal platform to provide an integrated collaboration solution. This scenario will provide our users the best both products have to offer in a single interface.
Everything is very good. It is very useful, friendly to users and it makes our work easier than what we expected. I think that I don't need any help from someone on how to use Genesys coz basically they will directly feed it to you without any hassle on using it.
Connections combines all the most useful abilities from various social networks. This makes it useful of course, but it also reduces user adoption time initially by allowing users to get comfortable with basic features. Once they are comfortable, it's easy for users to start exploring. They find new people in the organization to contact, new sources of information, etc. Before you know it, about half of the users are contributing back in some form -- and all with little or no training needed by IT.
The platform is highly reliable, with minimal downtime or outages, and is generally available when needed. Over the course of using it, unplanned outages or application errors have been rare, and any issues that did arise were quickly resolved. Genesys provides robust support and maintenance, ensuring the system remains operational during critical business hours. However, like any cloud-based platform, there have been occasional disruptions, though these were infrequent and quickly addressed. Overall, its availability has been excellent, supporting smooth daily operations.
Once Connections was installed, patched, etc. it was ALWAYS up. We only had to bring it down for OS updates to the servers. That seems to be typical of anything that runs on WebSphere; it's bulletproof and could probably run for months and years if the underlying OS didn't require constant patching.
Overall, the platform performs well, with pages loading quickly and reports typically completing in a reasonable time, even with complex data. The interface is responsive, and most day-to-day tasks are executed efficiently. However, in some instances, especially during peak usage times or when running very detailed, large-scale reports, there can be slight delays. While these are rare, they occasionally affect workflow. Additionally, the platform generally integrates smoothly with other systems, though some integrations can slow down slightly, particularly when pulling large datasets or interacting with older, legacy systems. Nonetheless, the performance is strong and reliable for most use cases.
IBM Connections web UI, mobile app (data sync to / from the device), and file transfer speeds were almost always very fast. It was rare for a slow-down of any kind, even when doing searches.
Support does indeed resolve the issue but they seem to be really slow and I have to stay on them to get my ticket handled. Everyone I have interacted with is very professional and pleasant. Other than being slow its been a good experience
IBM Support has ALWAYS been quick to respond, regardless of the product. Even first level techs seldom provide "canned" responses and they really try to help. If they can't help, they don't wallow around but engage the right person immediately. It's very rare that the first level tech needs to escalate, and even more rare when they do escalate and the next person engaged cannot solve it. We have been more than satisfied with IBM support's quick and professional responses to our issues.
Genesys team that provide trainings are friendly and professional. They helped us to understand well the product and the functionalities. The training was detailed with use cases. At the end, we got a task to develop that ended with success and we got some Genesys rewards. It was amazing experience
In general, it gives a description and can help to understand what to do and how. but: Sometimes, it does not keep up with changes in the system (for example, in the GUI changes, additional features and so on). Sometimes, much easier and helpful to read the documentation (https://help.mypurecloud.com/) that gives the "better" explanations and takes less time.
The first engineer that we had work with our team was not able to grasp our needs. However, Genesys Cloud CX quickly replaced that person with an overqualified engineer who joined our implementation team because he wanted to support our work.
Try to understand you will never find a product which suites all your end user for 100%. IBM Connections is the best of all breeds but if you go look on each functionality on its own there are better example out there. But as IBM COnnections delivers it all in just one platform makes it the best example about integration of different functionality into one platform.
I don't think it can even compare. Genesys Cloud CX is a whole different level. The biggest advantage was that Genesys cares about its customers, regardless of size; it listens to feedback, encourages customers to get involved with its roadmap, and provides so many educational resources to ensure you are well set for success after the implementation.
From the few times that I have used MS SharePoint, I can say that it doesn't seem to hold a candle to the robust features of IBM Connections. The out-of-the-box capabilities of IBM Connections are amazing and are more easy to access and use than what I've seen with MS SharePoint.
Genesys provides Licensing in 3 tier subscription types of licenses on top based on any business requirements then any sort of feature/functionality inclusion (or removal) is discussed openly. There are 2 types of billing models available which are "Named" and "Concurrent" based on the type of roles users will perform in Genesys Cloud CX environment (eg. Agent, Supervisor, Administrator, and Business Users) Also, the billing period/frequency starts on the actual day the platform is delivered.
I give Genesys a rating of 10 for scalability because of its ability to adapt seamlessly to growing business needs, whether expanding across multiple departments, locations, or regions. Its cloud-based infrastructure allows for easy scaling without the need for costly hardware upgrades or lengthy implementation times. As our organisation grew, we were able to add new agents, channels, and features without disrupting operations, which significantly enhanced our flexibility. The platform's design supports both small-scale and enterprise-level operations, making it ideal for evolving businesses. Additionally, its capacity to handle increased interaction volumes without compromising performance ensures that customer service quality remains high, even during peak times. This flexibility and ease of scaling, combined with real-time analytics and automation capabilities, make it highly effective for growing organisations.
Scaling UP is never an issue with IBM's core technologies like WebSphere, DB2, etc. as long as you have or can find the technical resources to implement it. Where IBM seems to fail is scaling DOWN for smaller organizations. Connections 5.0 on-premises would have required us to create 7 servers -- yes, they would be virtualized, but still that's 7 OS licenses, 40 virtual CPU cores, 80GB RAM, and a few TB of hard disk space. All to replace Quick which runs on 1 server with 1 OS license, 4 cores, 8GB RAM and 600GB of disk. Granted, there are major differences in capabilities between the two, but how do you get a CFO understand why features like a mobile app, file sync, and social sharing require 10x the back-end resources?
Professional services are definitely much more experienced than the support teams, and the price for their services is very fair. I wish that the support team could help answer simple questions about work that the PSS team does, however, so that we do not have to use our SOW for simple Q&A emails.
For a product-based company like ours, we have existing Genesys customers who can use our product, as we have already integrated our product & solution into Genesys.
By viewing Genesys as a contact center, we generate numerous ideas about what features need to be implemented.
Genesys is the best choice for big, enterprise-level businesses as it can handle multiple calls simultaneously seamlessly.
