Genesys PureConnect Review
Updated December 01, 2021
Genesys PureConnect Review
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Genesys PureConnect
PureConnect is being used for it's contact center engine only in our environment. We have two separate production environments, a fully functional UAT and a fully functional DEV environment. We are in the process of phasing out Avaya deployments with PureConnect so the footprint is continually increasing. PureConnect has added visibility of agent activity compared to previous solutions. We are a fully on premise customer, so we do not use CaaS (or PureConnect Cloud as it is more recently referred to). We're using various aspects of self service to allow customers to access information 24x7 even from groups that are only staffed M-F during regular business hours including various different webservice integrations. In addition to the traditional call channel, we are also using chat and inbound email across multiple organizations. With the ease of deployment of PureConnect's current chat (and the migration to the hosted wigets coming in the future) chat is a breeze to have up and running. We also have one agency using agentless outbound dialing for specific functions such as reminders and receipt notifications.
Pros
- PureConnect's customization through the c# API, web API and handlers is fairly welcoming to customization with a fair amount of supporting documentation.
- The dial plan in PureConnect is one of the best laid out that I have seen in a contact center product. It is very readable.
- The ability to farm out responsibilities like agent onboarding and terms to department level users through granular security is a real timesaver.
- The ease of setup of the platform of itself is practically unheard of in the call center space. Simple Windows wizards with easy to follow documentation and you can very easily have an environment that can pass BFT.
- The hub and spoke model of services employed by the core engine of pureconnect is very reliable.
Cons
- Genesys development strategy over the years has allowed the platform to become somewhat stagnant. Too much emphasis was put on PureCloud which is not an adequate replacement for PureConnect and the platform was only given bug fixes for a few years.
- The built in voicemail function feels like an afterthought and requires user action to complete polling for messages.
- They take far to long to address very basic SCRs (change requests for bugs) unless they are service impacting.
- Their entry level support has degraded somewhat since the acquisition.
- Webservice integration and customizations via handlers
- Ease of use of the client applications
- Platform stability
- The initial setup of the platform and deployment had a negative impact, as Interactive Intelligence sales oversold licenses and poorly designed the system with things like redundant imonitor servers and redundant storage servers that cannot properly be leveraged.
Do you think Genesys PureConnect (discontinued) delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Genesys PureConnect (discontinued)'s feature set?
Yes
Did Genesys PureConnect (discontinued) live up to sales and marketing promises?
No
Did implementation of Genesys PureConnect (discontinued) go as expected?
No
Would you buy Genesys PureConnect (discontinued) again?
No
Genesys PureConnect (discontinued) Feature Ratings
Using Genesys PureConnect
1800 - Contact center agents, supervisors and business analysts.
3 - We have one dedicated support person over the infrastructure and environment. We can achieve this because we only use Genesys PureConnect for the contact center engine and all of the telephony endpoints are through other systems (Cisco, Avaya, etc). We also farm out move/add/changes to our agencies themselves as the granular security allows for a lot of administrative flexibility.
- Inbound contact center traffic
- IVR self service
- Reporting and analysis of historical interactions.
- Workforce utilization and activity monitoring.
- Self Service IVR payments
- Replacing a legacy self service system that relied on a mainframe
- Broaden contact channels by adding an SMS broker
- expanding existing contact channels to further agencies
- additional integrations to bolster self service offerings.
Evaluating Genesys PureConnect and Competitors
Yes - We replaced (and are still in the process) of replacing Avaya contact center infrastructure. Genesys (Interactive Intelligence still owned CIC at the time) was selected as they won the competitive bid to replace the aging infrastructure. They met all of the bid requirements and were out of the other options available (renewing legacy Avaya support, Cisco, etc).
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
This was a competitive bid scenario. Price and features were the most important features together, as they are ultimately the deciding factors.
We have a standard process for accepting and submitting request for purchases for competitive bids. In the current market with the current trends, we would also look at pricing for services offered in a subscription model as well.
Genesys PureConnect Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Yes - For the second production environment we stood up, as the customer was transitioning off of a legacy system that was functioning in place, we fully stood up their new production servers, completed all of the needed network configuration, installed all applications and configured for base testing, migrated all of the users programming from the UAT environment and completed another UAT cycle in the new production environment (which was a nice luxury to have) before a full go live.
Change management was minimal - The way that this was implemented, change management was truly only concerned with the steps that were taken to integrate the platform into existing systems like the PBX we are trunked to, web service integrations, etc rather than the over-arching process which fell more under the scope of project management and the specific contact center project.
- Determining what features were critical enough to host them in our backup location (balancing the expense vs the value add)
- Working with a 3rd party doing a PSO design implementation for the customer's IVR while we were building the environment internally.
Genesys PureConnect Training
Genesys PureConnect Support
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Quick Resolution Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed Immediate help available Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | Need to explain problems multiple times |
Not Available
Yes - Genesys has a process for bug reporting and tracking through their SCR tracker/search tool. Some of the critical bugs, such as the .NET framework security changes in 2017 that resulted in bytestream read failures. Other, ancillary but simple fixes seem to sit on the back burner for an eternity.
Most recently, we migrated one of our callcenters IVR webservice integration from SOAP to REST. The version we were running on had support for REST, but did not, apparently, have the ability to parse NULL or DOUBLE values in the json response object. This caused some really amazing failures and havoc with calls in queue when this would get tripped. Genesys support stayed on the line, through a screenshare all the way to resolution on determining this as the cause of the issue. The agent even helped brainstorm a few ideas of how we could workaround the issue until we upgraded to a version that would handle these values.
Using Genesys PureConnect
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using | Requires technical support Lots to learn |
- Inbound attendant configuration.
- Configuring and customizing the dial plan
- Extending attendant and other functionality using call handlers
- User provisioning
- Management of workgroup skills
- Getting worthwhile data out of the built in reports
Yes, but I don't use it
Genesys PureConnect Reliability
Relationship with Genesys
Bring someone technical into the process early to ensure what the pre-sales engineering team is proposing for your environment makes sense. I cannot stress enough having someone on your side of the table who is knowledgeable in platform to ensure that your technical and capacity needs will be met by the pre-sales designed offering.
Upgrading Genesys PureConnect
Yes - If you are thinking of implementing now, good news: the application is super easy to upgrade. If you are an existing 3.0 or 4.0 customer looking to upgrade to a 20XX revision, you are in for a bit of pain. The modern upgrade process (after performing appropriate backups) is practically as easy as running a setup wizard for most programs. There are a few outliers: upgrading chat files and upgrading Interaction Connect, but Genesys is revamping chat in the near future and upgrading connect is straightforward, just different.
- Upgrades contain rolled up bug fixes
- Genesys is using the upgrades as an avenue to add more functionality to Interaction Connect
- Modern features trickling in from PureCloud and PureEngage (widgets, WebRTC, co-browse chat)
- more Dutch red...
- Chat switching from the current IIS hosted version to the new widget that just uses the web server as a reverse proxy
- Support for Windows server 2016
- Full TLS 1.2 support
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