And Ad Nederlof, Genesys president and chief executive, played to the crowd - first focusing on their importance to Genesys, then on the overall importance of customers.

"You are all my bosses. You pay for my house, my car, my salary, and my kid's school. Our customers are the most important thing," he told the more than 1,000 attendees. "We all have to accept that the value of a company is no longer two times revenue, but the company's customers."

Nederlof was also willing to put his money where his mouth is. He said Genesys plans to show just how important customers are by using ROI as a sales tool. Genesys will have a third party independent company do an ROI model for a customer and if the customer gets a better ROI than expected, the customer will pay Genesys a premium. If the ROI is less than expected Genesys will give a discount.

The San Francisco-based company also used the event to unveil an updated version of its contact center suit and introduce Verizon Communications as a corporate partner.

The company's flagship product is Genesys Suite 6, an integrated set of contact center solutions, which includes Enterprise Routing, Network Routing, Workforce Management, Outbound Contact, Internet Contact and Universal Workflow.

The updated offering - Version 6.5 - offers increased system performance and simplified global deployment, and includes more than 70 new features. Major enhancements include high availability and load distribution services; a set of graphical interfaces that can be localized in selected European and Asian languages; expanded platform and Web server support for Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Solaris operating system, and iPlanet and Apache Web servers; and increased IP support for call conferencing, recording and monitoring capabilities on both IP phones and proprietary PBX-phone systems.

The latest version of the suite, which is available immediately, also includes a host of new features including the ability to enable customers to request a callback instead of waiting on hold; intelligent content analysis of inbound email through natural language processing; an HTML-based chat alternative; and outbound campaign sequencing to monitor multiple campaigns.

As part of Suite 6.5, Genesys also unveiled the availability of Genesys Expert Contact, a new offering aimed at providing quicker resolution of customer inquiries by extending the customer interaction across the entire enterprise.

"The role of the contact center in the enterprise is to pull together all the customer touch points," Patricia Seybold, CEO of Patricia Seybold Group, a Boston-based market researcher. "It's the core of CRM capabilities and extending that to knowledge workers and experts is a good thing."

Expert Contact can be used in a variety of ways. Contact center agents can escalate a customer to a more appropriate knowledge expert using pre-defined, business rules-based routing. Businesses can also create routing strategies that identify customer profiles or needs and automatically put that customer in touch with the exact department or specialized expert required to resolve their issue. The product can be used to manage contact center overflow by routing calls to back up resources during peak times.

Expert Contact, which can transfer calls and the associated data to various locations - even those without computer-telephony integration technology, is available immediately to Genesys Suite 6 users. Pricing starts at $900 per seat.

Genesys also said that Verizon, which has been working with Genesys since 1995 to provide integrated services to more than 107,000 customer service representatives, has become one of Genesys's global partners. Genesys' other global partners include, IBM, SAP, Siebel Systems Inc., PeopleSoft Inc., Accenture Ltd., and Alcatel.

Genesys and Verizon plan to market applications that enable large businesses to integrate and manage all customer inquiries made by phone, email, and the web - including chat sessions. For its part, Verizon will deliver professional services, which includes project design, consulting, applications development, customization, integration, implementation, support and maintenance. Genesys will add its set of contact center applications.

The worldwide contact center market is expected to reach more than $90 billion in 2006 - growing 20 percent per year, according to market researcher IDC.