Seeing the potential growth of the Philippine BPO (business process outsourcing) industry and its shift to Personalized Process of Optimization (PPO), omnichannel and contact solutions provider Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories Inc. (Genesys) is extending a P6-10 billion investments to the country within the next five years.

“We started to build our APAC (Asia Pacific) shared services team in Manila in mid-2017,” said Tony Bates, CEO of Genesys. “Since then, the company has been investing significantly in our Philippine operations and tripled the size of our resources. We realize that we have put in lots of investment in infrastructure. We have great tools. We have to accelerate. What we can do is to deliver this innovation not only in the cloud but as a service to the customers so they can take advantage of this as well.”

As companies embrace digitalization with cloud migration, Genesys’ investments will transform its Manila office into a multi-design function center that would accommodate thousands of employees. At present, the local headquarters of the company has 500 employees across diverse divisions including finance, customer success, engineering, and IT, among others.

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“This will amplify our ability as a company to deliver game-changing customer experience capabilities that leverage the cloud, AI, and other emerging technologies to businesses across the country,” Bates said. “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.”

This may also be in preparation for the transformation from BPO to PPO, although Bates is still uncertain whether it’s happening sooner than later. He sees that personalization is a strategic necessity for brands and companies as the hyperconnected consumer is also a “hyper distracted” consumer.

“It’s not just about omnichannel but also about understanding the right context to engage consumers through different channels,” Bates explained. “We believe the future of technology is about a wide range of channels that consumers can interact with.”

Bates noted that consumers get thousands of brand messages every day and mere targeting may no longer work. What Genesys offers is what it calls “true personalization” designed from available data from customer relationship management. It utilizes the Genesys Cloud which is built to power personalization. The company leverages emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to match and deliver the right message to the intended customer.

“Our innovation will continue to be cloud-based and new elements will be cloud-delivered,” Bates said.