Alcatel-Lucent Genesys maps out successful social media strategy for enterprises that includes strong linkage between customer service and marketing

Innovative new vision and social media tools showcased at G-Force Melbourne

Melbourne, Australia - Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) today unveiled the Genesys Social Media Strategy that urges companies to aggressively bring social media practices to the next level by using business tools to tie social media community interactions with customer service and marketing organizations. The unique insights as well as social media tools were shared at the Genesys G-Force Melbourne User Conference and are available online.

Consumers expect companies to engage with them via social media and while almost every company has made an attempt to establish such a presence it is typically done manually in standalone deployments and in response to consumer queries and complaints. The lack of an enterprise-wide social media strategy and engaging with consumers only, in a department-by-department basis, contribute to a poor consumer experience and ultimately undermine brand advocacy and loyalty.

“For the past few years social media has impacted the way companies communicate with consumers and their employees, resulting mainly in the leveraging of Facebook and/or Twitter as another channel to distribute press releases and other marketing material,” commented Brian Riggs, Research Director, Enterprise Software and Communications at Current Analysis. “As enterprises approach to social media matures, it will be critical for them to invest in tools that allow them to integrate social media efforts across marketing, communications and the contact center and directly impact revenues and operational expenses.”

The Alcatel-Lucent Genesys Strategy encourages enterprises to construct an integrated social media approach that builds on four actions:

1. Listen: Capture and leverage community / tribal knowledge to gain valuable insight into consumer sentiments about products, services and emotional engagement with the brand

2. Prioritize: Define and prioritize what actions to take toward the community, individual posts or within the enterprise

3. Engage: Proceed with relevant actions to respond, inform and notify individuals as appropriate while focusing resources on consumers of particular value to the company

4. Integrate: Integrate conversations across marketing and customer service organizations and other touch points while leveraging expertise across the broader enterprise and existing IT investments



G-Force Melbourne shows social media tools

Genesys has started to integrate tools into its offerings to help enterprises begin to create a foundation for a strong cross-functional approach to social media. A few of these will be shown at G-Force Melbourne including:

* New upgrades that integrate with Facebook and Twitter to respond, inform and notify consumers while leveraging Genesys’ market-leading customer interaction management (CIM) platform to direct and route messages to the most appropriate resource.
* A community building platform from external link Lithium Technologies’ that allows enterprises to monitor and address consumer issues outside of the traditional contact center. When combined with the Genesys Contact Center/Customer Service Software, agents are given visibility into valuable community content and consumers can easily navigate from a self-help area to a live agent.
* Ability to integrate social monitoring through an open interface, facilitating the ability to listen to and capture content from consumers on social sites. Genesys software then manages, prioritizes, escalates, assigns service level agreements (SLAs) and routes the interactions to the best possible resource.

According to a 2010 study by the Society of New Communications Research, “72 percent of respondents said they used social media to research a company’s reputation for customer care before making a purchase, and 74 percent choose to do business with companies based on the customer care experiences shared by others online.” With such large percentages of consumers using social media to acquire knowledge about a company to form a purchase decision, it is critical that companies integrate social media into their marketing and customer service business.

“As more consumers use social media there is an increasing desire to engage with businesses,” said Eric Tamblyn, vice president, Genesys Product Marketing at Alcatel-Lucent. “Marketing and customer service departments are both challenged with supporting these new touch points and retaining consumer information collected if the conversation extends to other departments. By leveraging the Genesys solution’s ability to optimize interactions across voice and non-voice touch points, businesses can proactively market and provide consistent customer service via Web applications, phone or mobile devices, delivering an exceptional experience for their consumers.”

About Society for New Communications Research
The Society for New Communications Research (external linkwww.sncr.org) is a global nonprofit 501(c)(3) research and education foundation and think tank dedicated to the advanced study of the latest developments in new media and communications, and their effect on traditional media and business models, communications, culture and society.

About Genesys software solutions
Genesys software solutions from Alcatel-Lucent manage customer interactions over phone, Web and mobile devices. The Genesys software suite handles customer conversations across multiple channels and resources - self-service, assisted-service and proactive outreach - fulfilling customer requests and optimizing customer care goals while efficiently using resources. Genesys software directs more than 100 million customer interactions every day for 4,000 companies and government agencies in 80 countries. These companies and agencies leverage their entire organization, from the contact center to the back office, while dynamically engaging their customers. For more information, go to external linkwww.genesyslab.com.

About Alcatel-Lucent
Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) is the trusted transformation partner of service providers, enterprises, strategic industries such as defense, energy, healthcare, transportation, and governments worldwide, providing solutions to deliver voice, data and video communication services to end-users. A leader in fixed, mobile and converged broadband networking, IP and optics technologies, applications and services, Alcatel-Lucent leverages the unrivalled technical and scientific expertise of Bell Labs, one of the largest innovation powerhouses in the communications industry. With operations in more than 130 countries and the most experienced global services organization in the industry, Alcatel-Lucent is a local partner with a global reach. Alcatel-Lucent achieved revenues of Euro 15.2 billion in 2009 and is incorporated in France, with executive offices located in Paris. For more information, visit Alcatel-Lucent on the Internet: http://www.alcatel-lucent.com, read the latest posts on the Alcatel-Lucent blog http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/blog and follow us on Twitter: external linkhttp://twitter.com/Alcatel_Lucent.