Genesys Cloud is an enterprise-level contact center and business communications platform. It’s a scalable option for global organizations with thousands of employees—particularly for contact centers that want to offer support via social media, texting, and web chat, in addition to phone calls. But it comes at a premium price point, and it’s way too complicated for smaller companies.
How Does Genesys Cloud Compare to the Best Call Center Software?
Nextiva is our favorite call center software on the market. It offers solutions for every business size, from brand new teams to midsize or enterprise centers that span the globe. RingCentral is a great choice for midsize call centers looking for advanced workforce management and optimization features.
Genesys Cloud is far more advanced than most call center software, including Nextiva and RingCentral. But it’s priced significantly higher, and it’s definitely more of an enterprise-grade solution.
You should consider Genesys Cloud if you already have over 1,000 employees across multiple contact center locations. But Nextiva or RingCentral are a better place to start if you’re not there yet.
Check out our full list of the best call center software to learn more about more options.
Genesys Cloud: The Good and The Bad
Genesys Cloud is known for its advanced features, scalability, and centralizing communication across multiple channels. It’s highly flexible, and even comes with built-in functions for team collaboration and workforce management.
Just be forewarned that it’s expensive and somewhat complicated. There are a few sales-specific issues to be aware of, and you may need to rely on a third-party provider to assist with your setup.
The Good
Advanced features: To say that Genesys Cloud is a powerful solution would be drastic understatement. It’s one of the most advanced business communication tools on the market, loaded with every feature or capability you could imagine. It’s a unified communications tool that comes with predictive routing, ACD, speech-enabled IVR, self-help bots, voicebots, predictive engagement—the list goes on and on.
Highly scalable: Massive brands with a global audience rely on Genesys Cloud as a contact center and business communication platform. From airlines with over 20,000 employees to healthcare companies with nearly 400,000 members, Genesys is built to scale no matter how many agents, employees, or customers you have. Genesys Cloud powers over 45 million conversations every day.
Omnichannel support: Beyond phone support, Genesys Cloud lets you run a contact center via chat, text, social media, and web messaging—all under one roof. This gives your current and prospective customers more options to contact you, while providing your agents with a unified platform that brings all of those conversations together in one place.
Built-in workforce engagement management (WEM): Select plans come with a complete WEM platform, which can help improve your employee retention rates while managing your resources effectively. This is a crucial feature for larger organizations that would otherwise need to get this type of a tool elsewhere. But by pairing it with your contact center solution, you get added benefits like agent sentiment analysis, quality assurance, and compliance features, all in the same place.
Integrated agent collaboration tools: Genesys Cloud doubles as an internal communication platform. Your contact center agents and the entire organization will have access to features like video chat, screen sharing, document management, team chat, and more. It brings all of your internal and external communication needs together under, as an all-in-one solution.
Flexible and customizable: Genesys is robust enough out-of-the-box with its native components. But if you have internal IT resources and want to do more, its possibilities are really limitless. Thanks to the cloud-first ecosystem, open APIs, and vast partner network, you can fully customize Genesys to fit your unique needs. You can keep your own carrier, embed it on web apps, and connect it with over 350+ pre-built integrations.
The Bad
Expensive: The starting price of Genesys Cloud is 4-5 times higher than other business communication tools on the market. To unlock all of the platform’s capabilities, including AI add-ons, you could be spending upwards of $200 per month per user. These rates aren’t an option for many businesses.
Too complex for smaller businesses: Even if you’re a smaller company with deep pockets, Genesys is likely too complicated to support your needs. You could make it work and configure it for a small team, but there’s no reason to do so when there are far simpler solutions on the market.
Some issues for sales teams: Genesys Cloud can be used for a wide range of use cases, including inbound and outbound sales. But there are several customer reviews pointing to some sales-specific problems with the platform. For one, the agent capabilities available within Genesys Cloud don’t extend to the Salesforce-embedded app. Other customers mentioned that the sales leaderboard feature doesn’t always work as advertised, and misses some calls in the standings.
May require third-party setup and support: Many businesses use a third-party provider in the Genesys partner directory to deploy the system. These services are commonly used for setup, configuration, outsourced training, consulting, device pairing, infrastructure design, provisioning—basically everything that would normally be provided directly by the platform. Your options here will vary depending on your location, and there’s some inconsistencies between what’s offered and provided by different companies in the partner network.
Genesys Cloud’s Noteworthy Features
AI-Powered Voicebots
Genesys is one of the only contact center solutions we’ve seen that uses AI voice to automate and drive caller interactions. It’s one thing to understand what callers are saying and then route them to the appropriate department (lots of tools do this), but these bots actually converse with your customers.
It’s powered by natural language understanding (NLU) and voice recognition, which is designed to understand the caller’s intent so they can quickly answer questions. These bots can be used to replace the need for human interaction whenever necessary. But if the bot can’t serve the caller, they can simply route them to the right agent or department.
When escalated or passed along to a human agent, the AI automatically provides contextual information and details from the call. So callers won’t have to repeat themselves when they’re connected to a real person.
Automatic Call Distribution (ACD)
You have several different routing options at your disposal when with Genesys. You could just use basic ACD to keep things simple—by sending incoming calls or digital interactions to agents who have been idle the longest. Or you can just route calls to the first available agent.
Beyond the basics, Genesys Cloud has several advanced ACD options to consider as well. Options include preferred agent routing, data-based routing, conditional routing, dynamic agent routing, and more. These options can help you meet SLAs or ensure that incoming interactions are routed to people with the right skill sets. If the same agent is available, you can even set up your ACD to route calls or messages to someone who has dealt with this customer in the past.
Overall, this is one of the most advanced ACDs we’ve seen on the market.
Speech-Enabled IVR
Similar to the ACD and call-routing capabilities, the interactive voice response (IVR) offered by Genesys is more advanced than many others you’ll find. It’s much more advanced than a simple auto-attendant, as this IVR uses speech recognition to ensure conversations feel more natural.
They’re highly personalized and adaptive—supporting a customer’s journey across different channels. This feature accomplishes multiple things simultaneously. It reduces agent workload, increases team productivity, and helps provide customer self-service while eliminating the need for a receptionist.
You can also provide customers with a visual IVR, which has a touchscreen navigation element. It’s a bit more personalized and customers aren’t forced to remember the menu options.
Web Messaging, SMS, Email, and Social Media Support
This is an area where Genesys really shines, and it’s one of the main reasons why so many large businesses sign up for a Genesys Cloud that includes digital communication channels.
You can ultimately provide inbound support or even outbound sales via web chat, email, text messaging, and social media. The nature of Genesys Cloud is so customizable that you can embed different chat boxes and widgets on websites and apps. And since everything is centralized and asynchronous, a customer who reaches out via Facebook and then again through your website won’t have to repeat their question—everything is compiled in a continuous conversation.
On the agent side, all of this is presented into one unified view. Customers can even let agents see their screens in real-time for a co-browsing experience, helping to provide white-glove support and guided assistance.
Inbound/Outbound Blending
This is another unique feature that we don’t often see from contact center solutions. Genesys Cloud supports blended agents—meaning you can set up your contact center staff to handle both inbound and outbound communication capabilities.
One agent can field incoming calls and respond to inbound social media messages while simultaneously chatting with someone reaching out via live chat on your website. If none of these things are happening, that same person can also dial out to reach a potential lead.
This helps you maximize how your agents spend their time, while getting everything you need from the same platform. With other tools on the market, you’ll need to get multiple products for inbound phone support, omnichannel communication, and sales dialing. But Genesys has it all.
Genesys Pricing, Plans, and Add-Ons
There are five different Genesys Cloud plans to choose from. Let’s take a closer look at each one below.
- Genesys Cloud 1 (Voice) — $75 per user per month
- Genesys Cloud 2 (Digital) — $95 per user per month
- Genesys Cloud 2 (Digital + Voice) — $115 per user per month
- Genesys Cloud 3 (Digital + WEM) — $135 per user per month
- Genesys Cloud 3 (Digital + Voice + WEM) — $155 per user per month
These are the standard rates charged per user, billed annually. However, you can also inquire about per-hour pricing if you have contact centers with part-time staff. Genesys also has a concurrent pricing model where you can pay for simultaneous users working across multiple shifts within a 24-hour period.
Most businesses start with the Cloud 2 (Digital + Voice) tier. It’s a decent value when you consider the cost of getting these tools separately costs $170, but the bundled rate is $115.
Plus, using such an advanced platform like Genesys Cloud for voice-only doesn’t seem logical. The whole point of going this route is to tap into advanced capabilities, which you’ll get with the digital communications platform—covering web messaging, SMS, email, social media, and more.
We typically won’t recommend any of the options that don’t include voice. While there are some potential use cases for this, the price for Genesys Cloud without voice capabilities just isn’t worth it. You could use other omnichannel support platforms and pay less for a simpler deployment.
You can optionally purchase the AI Experience add-on for $40 per user per month with any plan. This gives you access to predictive engagement, voice bots, predictive routing, automation tools, and real-time contextual insights for agents.
Is Genesys Right for You?
Genesys is a solid choice for large enterprises. If you have 1,000, 10,000 or even 20,000 employees, Genesys Cloud is advanced and scalable enough to support your needs as a contact center and internal communication tool.
It works really well for providing omnichannel communication via phone, SMS, live chat, email, and social media. The software centralizes all of these different channels in one place, so it’s a seamless transition for your agents, and customers can connect with you through their preferred channels.
You may also want to consider Genesys if you want advanced AI and automation features. It comes with incredible AI-powered voice bots and self-help automations to provide customer support without any human interaction.
With that said, there’s no reason to consider Genesys if you have a small business. Even larger organizations and scaling midsize organizations can find a more cost-effective and simpler solution elsewhere, without sacrificing any advanced features that you’ll actually need.
If you don’t have the budget upwards of $90,000 or even more every year on a call center solution, there are plenty of viable alternatives to consider.
You could use Genesys Cloud as a voice-only call center (there’s a plan for this). But it’s much better when paired with other communication options. So if you just need traditional calling capabilities for your call center, we advise you to look elsewhere.
Learn more about Genesys Cloud here, and refer to our reviews of the best call center software to see the other tools that we recommend.
