Genesys PureConnect was an omnichannel contact center platform that offered cloud-based or on-premise deployments. It featured a SIP-based architecture with VoIP capabilities, allowing companies to connect legacy voice systems and use existing phones. A legacy product, new users are encouraged to investigate Genesys Cloud.
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Sangoma Asterisk
Score 8.1 out of 10
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Asterisk is an open source toolkit for building communications applications, now owned and supported by Sangoma (acquired with Digium in 2018). Most Asterisk-based systems and solutions require additional components (e.g. IP-phones, VoIP gateways or telephony interface cards, and other hardware), and expertise.
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.
Digium Asterisk is well suited for a city government as a communications solution for internal and external use. Other options like PBX are more expensive and hard to escalate. VoIP makes it easier to use the communications infrastructure instead that already exists rather than having to wire every phone when the solution is a digital or analog phone. In my city, government offices are not in the same place, which makes it harder to communicate everything together.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[Based on] my experience, we initially had to deal with Avaya PBXs, the same applies to client instrumentation (telephones, etc.). Surely we are talking about a product much more "business-like", but the management and implementation has a high cost and is not as simple as it can be (or better) with Asterisk.
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.
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.
