“So, what does that mean? It’s actually mind-blowing. At least within five years, we will commit somewhere between six to 10 billion pesos to the region. Six to 10 billion pesos in the Philippines alone.”
— Genesys CEO Tony Bates
By EDD K. USMAN
Twitter: @edd1819, Instagram: @bluestar0910, Facebook: Science, Digital & Current Affairs
MANILA (SDN) — GENESYS is committing from Php6 billion to Php10 billion investments in the Philippines.
No less than Genesys CEO Tony Bates made this big revelation before a select group of members of the Philippine news media in Makati City, Metro Manila
He was here for the Genesys Asia Pacific (APAC) Tour ‘s Philippine leg laying down the company’s plans for the APAC region. He had notable specifics for the Philippines.
Headquartered in Daly City, California, United States, Genesys provides cloud-based and on-premises software. The company is known as a global leader for omnichannel experience and contact center solutions.
Apparently, Genesys is encouraged by the Philippines’ standing in the BPO (business process outsourcing) industry, housing many BPO companies that employ more than 800,000 Filipinos.
“This is one of the biggest concentrations of BPO centers in the world. The dialogue is no longer ‘should I do it. It is a matter of when do I do it,'” Bates said.
The Philippines, he noted, performs well in cloud adoption, a 180 percent year-on-year (YoY) growth. “So, that is why we are here in the region…we are very excited with the acceleration pace.”
“But what I would think is the next wave which would really help, perhaps lead in the Philippines, is PPO (personalized process optimization). We are actually getting a lot of traction in the PPO.
“So, we are very excited in this transformation. That is one of the reasons why we are here. In the last three years as a company, as an enterprise, we have tripled the size of our resources. We just broke the 500 employees mark, and that’s a mixture of center of excellence, not just outsourcing, IT, finance engineering.”
Bates revealed that his plans over the coming three years include doubling the size of the company’s footprint in the Philippines at business level.
“With the great traction of businesses in the Asia Pacific region converting to the cloud, we are planning to double the size of our Manila office…this will amplify our ability as a company to deliver game-changing customer experience capabilities that leverage the cloud, AI (artificial intelligence), and other emerging technologies to business across the country.”
And here’s the best part.
“So, what does that mean? It’s actually mind-blowing,” Bates said.
“At least within five years, we will commit somewhere between six to 10 billion pesos to the region. Six to 10 billion pesos in the Philippines alone.
“The reason why we do that is we have a very strong footprint, airlines, consumer companies…So, I would say within two years our Manila office would become the largest office, larger than our offices in the U.S.”
Bates was with two other Genesys executives, David Liddicoat, vice president for APAC Finance and Manila Site Leader, and Gwilym Funnel, senior vice president for APAC Sales, at the media briefing held at Makati Shangri-La Manila.
They laid down the company’s growth strategy for the local market. Genesys stamped its footprint in the country in mid-2017, and now it already employs at least 500 Filipinos, and growing.
“We see great potential in the Philippines, especially with the country being one of the top global providers of (BPO) and its growth being fueled not by traditional low value added agents but by the high-end process outsourcing or knowledge process outsourcing (KPO),” said the Genesys CEO.
Bates is at the forefront of the American company’s strategy, direction and operations in over 100 countries and counts on a global team of over 5,000 personnel.
He has under his belt decades of experience at the helm of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies through major market transitions and rapid scaling. He is also passionate technologist at heart.
Bates’ career highlights include leading Cisco’s Service Provider business and serving as Skype CEO. Presently, he also serves on the Board of VMWare and eBay.
Some highlights of the briefing as Bates laid down:
- We are also looking at application development tools as an area where the Philippines cane excel. The market place is very rich and it would also be easy for us to penetrate and drive application development tools on top.
- On the heels of personalization, according to a recent poll you commissioned, consumers are having a positive experience with chatbots, customer service bots to be precise when it comes to their support needs except for more complex problems. Is your company a good springboard when it comes to the combination of PureCloud and the workforce engagement management groups (WEM) that caused the restructure that unified Cloud and Core?
- Under the new structure, the two units – Genesys Cloud and Genesys Core – will be unified by the cloud division by combining the PureCloud and workforce engagement (WEM) group. The second unit, Genesys Core, is comprised of PureEngage and PureConnect on-premises and cloud. This would mean customers will benefit from faster delivery of targeted portfolio enhancements and artificial intelligence-driven applications at scale. This would also enable us to provide even greater value to our
customers and partners by rapidly delivering innovation across our market-leading product portfolio. - Just to put in perspective, we are attracting about 60% workforce engagement in evert contact center right now in the cloud. Chatbots can do things very well but when you get to the next level of escalation, we need to the change the BPO into the highest skilled knowledge. The takeaway here is the expertise – Genesys’ knowledge in personalization.
The Genesys CEO emphasized that digital transformation is accelerating across the globe that pushes customer experience as vital for businesses to maintain their competitive advantage.
“Genesys customer experience platform, backed by AI and cloud technologies will aim to solve this challenge,” assured Bates. (SDN)