Global Voice for Genesys: Everything You Need To Know
Genesys is a regular in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CCaaS, consistently earning recognition as a leader. Going head-to-head with giants like Amazon and cloud pureplay specialists like Five9 and NICE, presence in the top right-hand side of the quadrant is no mean feat.
This alone, however, isn’t enough to decide that Genesys is the option for your business. But, if you do, there is still a big decision to be made about your voice connectivity. That’s precisely what we’re going to address in this guide.
Before we get into the ins and outs of Genesys’ telecom options, it’s important to understand the difficulties faced when managing voice infrastructure across multiple locations.
With its AppFoundry model, which provides a lot of choice when it comes to selecting your voice carrier, this is where Genesys stands out against many of its rivals.
Challenges of Managing Voice Infrastructure Across Different Regions
In global deployments, IT managers, network architects, and ultimately the CTO, are tasked with ensuring high-quality and easily manageable voice all the time. If this falters in any way, it causes issues of varying importance to your technical, financial, and reputational potential.
Importance of high-quality voice for global contact centers
Your contact center is the first line of support for all your customers. For some, it’s the only contact they will ever have with you. Therefore, it must be a pleasant experience both in terms of outcome and actual participation.
If you suffer jittery calls, drops in service (forcing the caller to phone back), or any kind of discomfort on a call, this is what you become remembered for. Everything great that came before gets superseded by a poor call.
As a result of this, customers’ perception of you changes. You are no longer the reliable provider of your service. Instead, you are the people who it’s hard to have a conversation with. The company that requires extreme effort to contact. Not a desirable place at all.
The impacts of low call quality may seem extreme. But how does this sound?
- Poor customer satisfaction
- Dwindling customer loyalty and increasing customer churn
- Damage to brand reputation and bad reviews online
There’s also the decrease in operational efficiency that must be addressed. If your IT teams spend increasing time on call quality and voice issues, larger projects that need careful attention fall by the wayside.
Growing demand for reliable, global voice solutions
Whether you plan for global expansion or it happens overnight, expectations remain the same.
Sure, customers get the email saying you’ve acquired another company. But they still demand business as usual.
This means not only do you have a handful (or many hands full) of new users to onboard, but you also have to increase network capacity, ensure sufficient bandwidth, and provision new handsets, headsets, softphones, etc.
It’s a busy period where infrastructure challenges like call quality can get unintentionally deprioritized.
What you need here is a global voice partner who gives you the confidence to scale international business operations without compromising on quality. There must be no correlation between the number of users added and dip in voice quality. Not only should your voice carrier support the regions you’re expanding into, it has to provide a continued high level of service to you, so you can provide that expected level of service to your customers.
Call quality must remain constant for your expansion to be a success from day one.
Read Next: 9 Best Practices for Managing Global Voice
Challenges in managing voice infrastructure across multiple regions
When you’ve got localized IT resources spread across your locations, it’s easy for them to fall into their own habits and technology stacks.
This intensifies when each region uses its own contact center or voice infrastructure. Any siloed way of working is proven to be less efficient than an aligned workforce. In fact, a research paper by Beatrice van der Heijden at the Radboud University deemed working in silos as the greatest threat to organizational performance.
Throw in common challenges like language barriers, time zones, and compliance and regulation factors, and you have a real job on your hands.
Now, we’re not saying that local resources per country or region is a bad idea. Far from it. But you must all be aligned. Especially if you need those regions to communicate with each other.
Roleplay: What happens if your New York call center goes down?
In an ideal world, it automatically fails over to another call center in a similar time zone. However, setting up network infrastructure across multiple regions for optimal performance involves addressing various issues:
- Latency
- Throughput
- Resiliency
- Availability
It’s a significant technical challenge to maintain optimal network and voice performance for inter-region network architecture. But it can be done with the help of a reliable voice carrier and a global deployment partner.
Watch the Webinar: 6 Best Practices to Optimize Your Global Reach
Genesys Calling Plans: What’s Available?
When considering your global voice needs, there are several routes you can take.
One option is going directly through Genesys—and we’ll explain some considerations about whether or not to use Genesys Cloud Voice in a moment.
You can also choose a partner from the Genesys AppFoundry. This is a marketplace for verified partners to showcase their integrations across a number of categories:
- Voice and unified communications
- Workforce management
- Security and compliance
- Business intelligence
- CRM and case management
- Video and mobility
- Bots and automation
Genesys Cloud Voice Coverage and Number Types
Genesys provides direct coverage in approximately 40 countries. You can get new local and toll-free numbers for your organization. You can also port your own numbers (bring your own carrier) from your existing carrier onto Genesys.
Local DID numbers
Country coverage may vary based on the location of your Genesys data center. For example, if you are located in the following Genesys data center regions:
- US East
- US West
- Canada
- South America
Then you can purchase numbers in the following locations:
| APAC | EMEA | LATAM |
|---|---|---|
|
|
|
If you are located in the EMEA region, you can purchase numbers in the following regions:
| APAC | EMEA | LATAM |
|---|---|---|
|
|
|
A word on number porting to Genesys
There is a 500-number limit when porting numbers into Genesys. If you need more numbers than 500, you must undertake the “large batch” porting process.
If you have under 500 numbers, the porting process is fairly simple. Using the self-service portal, all you need to do is complete the required number and address information, choose a date, and match up with your technology go-live date.
Here, the vital criteria must match with the losing provider (i.e. your existing carrier) for the port to pass validation.
Direct collaboration with Genesys vs. BYOC
For regions outside of those covered by Genesys, you can lean on a verified partner, available in the AppFoundry.
There are pros and cons to going direct with Genesys (if your locations are supported). The same applies to using a partner or bringing your own carrier.
| Considerations | When to Collaborate Directly with Genesys | When to Bring Your Own Carrier with the Right Partner |
|---|---|---|
| Coverage | You only need coverage within the 40 countries Genesys supports | Operate globally or deeply in regions underserved by Genesys (APAC, LATAM, Africa, Middle East, etc.) |
| Software | Needs focused on cost and call detail records reporting | Desire features and analytics for call quality, number usage and connectivity testing |
| Vendor Relationship | Value management with one vendor (CCaaS + Voice) | Value working directly with voice carrier partner |
| Integrations | Integration options with other Genesys products | One voice provider to connect with CCaaS, UCaaS, and other apps |
Choose to use Genesys direct if:
- You value a single bill over customization options
- Genesys supports all the locations you need to support
- You plan to heavily integrate with other Genesys products
Bring your own carrier if:
- You have existing discounts for calling
- Customization is your most important factor
- An AppFoundry carrier partner better meets your coverage needs
- You have a healthy long-standing relationship with your existing calling provider
Find your Perfect Voice Partner on Genesys AppFoundry
Within the Genesys AppFoundry, you have the option to filter partners by their industries supported and by the type of product they provide.
To filter by industry, click the All Industries drop down menu.
You can also use the product type menu on the left-hand side to narrow your search.
Let’s say you’re a Retail business looking for a Telco and Devices partner. You’d select the filters on both menus and get presented with these four potential partners.
Benefits of using AppFoundry for discovering voice partners
The goal of the Genesys AppFoundry is to “offer the most useful solution-centric marketplace for all Genesys platforms in a single location.”
When you use the AppFoundry to find a voice partner for your Genesys implementation, you’re subscribing to one of the following:
- Developers: Free apps developed by Genesys customers or partners.
- Genesys: Apps created by Genesys, available free or paid.
- Premium: Apps created by customers or partners, available for a fee.
As such, the agreement you sign up to may not be with Genesys, but the app developer or partner. However, in some cases, there is a revenue share between the partner and Genesys.
To join the AppFoundry ISV Partner Program, vendors must be evaluated for technical and market capabilities by Genesys before publishing. Over time, Genesys measures performance to ensure the quality of the app.
When looking for a Genesys voice partner, the AppFoundry ensures you are choosing from select partners who hit the following criteria:
- Published technology roadmap
- Completed interoperability testing
- Is a Genesys Cloud Certified Partner
- Follow Genesys Code of Conduct
Key criteria for evaluating voice partners on AppFoundry
First, your partner needs to provide voice connectivity in the regions you need it.
List of AppFoundry voice partners per region
| Genesys Voice Partner | Coverage |
|---|---|
| AVOXI |
|
| Star Telecom |
|
| Peerless Network |
|
| Tata Communications |
|
| Bandwidth |
|
| Peoplefone |
|
| KDDI |
|
| Vonage |
|
| DIDWW |
|
| Telnyx |
|
| NTT |
|
| Colt |
|
| Twilio |
|
Outside of simply matching your regions, it’s important to get an understanding of your vendors’ history delivering comprehensive solutions.
For example, a business with no case studies and an empty description box is a red flag.
On the flip side, customer names and case studies relevant to your field, showcasing Genesys telecom deployments, is a major win.
Your goal is here to find out the extent of the partner’s integration and compatibility capabilities. Whether they have the expertise and resources needed to manage your deployment is a crucial factor.
Key criteria for evaluating voice partners on AppFoundry
First, your partner needs to provide voice connectivity in the regions you need it.
Call Routing Options for Genesys Contact Centers
There are three ways to connect your voice traffic to your Genesys contact center:
- SIP trunking: Uses VoIP connectivity to connect your voice system to your contact center and carry your contact center traffic, making all calls on-net.
- Call forwarding: Diverts call center numbers to your voice system, charged on a per call basis.
- Hybrid approaches: A combination of some SIP trunking and some call forwarding. .
List of AppFoundry voice partners per region
The most obvious benefit when using SIP to enable your call routing is all calls are carried out over the internet. You’ve effectively moved your incoming phone numbers to the same aggregate platform as the numbers you use to make and receive calls.
This comes with a host of benefits:
- Greater control over call routing: Total flexibility of call plans, queues, diverts, etc.
- Enhanced call quality and reliability: No longer relying on second-hand traffic and multiple hops.
- Cost-effectiveness for high-volume call traffic: No cost of call forwarding service or per call usage fees.
There’s also the small matter of implementing a secure and resilient call routing architecture. If your agents receiving calls are reliant on a third party or another phone system, you’re several steps away from being able to configure a disaster recovery plan, should an outage or natural disaster occur.
This would mean finding the originating source at the point of failure and figuring out new diverts and overflows. When you use SIP trunk connectivity directly to your contact center, you join everything together in the same network and gain superior control.
Best Practices for Selecting Numbers & Ensuring Global Coverage
Okay, so you’ve decided which route you’re taking: with Genesys or via an AppFoundry partner. Next up, you need to make a firm decision around which numbers and number types you need.
Note: If you’re porting your existing numbers and keeping your setup the same, you can likely skip this step. However, we can’t stress enough how important it is to audit your numbers before you port. You won’t believe how many unused numbers get ported over (and charged) simply because nobody checked whether they were needed.
Considerations for coverage and number types
Ensuring comprehensive global coverage
First, can the provider in question provide numbers and coverage in all the regions you need? There is a major difference between “Global coverage” and actually being able to support your voice traffic in specific countries.
If vendors don’t disclose the extent of their global coverage, it’s often because global doesn’t cover the entire globe. It’s also just useful for you on your buying journey to view and list and check off all the countries you need.
Honestly, why do some voice providers make it so hard?!
Matching number types to different regions and use cases
So you know your vendor supports everywhere you need coverage. Now it’s time to plan where these numbers come into play.
They could be numbers you already have diverting via call forwards. Turning on voice connectivity for a Genesys contact center is usually triggered by a need to save money on legacy setups.
Here, you must map where one number needs to accept calls (e.g. All support calls from the USA). Next, you must identify where those incoming calls will be received. This might be your USA support team or it could be an outsourced call center.
And then what happens when that team is busy? Do you turn on voicemail, enable queue callbacks, or route to another team?
The decision is yours. But it must be planned and ready for go-live.
Managing number inventory effectively
Before you port, audit your existing number inventory. Seriously, folks. It (literally) pays to do this.
Even if it’s a rough spreadsheet, extract all the numbers on your phone system and that are being diverted to your call center agents. Then, match a use for each number.
If you have numbers that no longer ring or haven’t been used for ages, make a decision regarding what happens to them.
It might be that they’re part of a sequential DID range. In this case, you keep them for future use. If it’s a random number you inherited from the last IT manager, there’s absolutely no need to pay for this to get ported.
Complying with regional regulations and industry standards
One final element to consider when buying new numbers (or porting existing) is whether there are any local or international regulations you must be aware of.
This could range from E911 requirements in the US to the Brazilian guidelines that each CNPJ can be connected to a maximum of five Brazil toll-free numbers.
It can get complicated when you’re attempting to show a presence within a country you’re not physically located in, so make sure you’re clued up before you press the button.
Questions about international compliance? Book a call with an AVOXI consultant.
Why AVOXI?
We’re all about global quality. That’s global coverage and consistent quality across all your regions.
With coverage in over 150 countries, if you’ve been there, we’ve probably made a call there.
Our extensive number inventory means it’s not a surprise when you say you need to add voice to your Genesys contact center in [insert random country here].
We’ve been helping Genesys customers look after their voice traffic for decades now. So we know a thing or two about it.
It’s not just the voice we’re talking about here, either.
When you choose AVOXI for your Genesys voice integration, you get a software-delivered platform packed full of enhanced features like analytics and fraud prevention.
What’s more, you can lean on our expert support and guidance for implementation and ongoing management.
Need help with…
- Superior call quality?
- Worldwide reliability?
- Preparing your number inventory?
- Finding suitable pricing with flexible billing options?
- Planning call routing ready to turn off call forwarding?
Then you need AVOXI.
Our SIP connection to Genesys provides a straightforward solution for you to take advantage of our global voice coverage and exceptional call quality while operating out of your Genesys contact center.
Ready to move forward?
Check out the demo.
Check out the demo.
