It is unfortunate that business-focused digital communications are sold under three different headings: Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS), Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS) and Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS). (And that just counts the cloud options—let us acknowledge the huge, continuing, installed base on premises.) These are terrible ways to describe complex, varied and overlapping offerings. What distinguishes them are:
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Topics:
Customer Engagement,
Customer Experience,
Contact Center,
Customer Experience Management,
Digital Communications,
CCaaS,
Intelligent Self-Service,
CPaaS,
UCaaS,
CXM
Self-service has changed immensely in recent years. It has gotten better, qualitatively, in delivering answers and resolutions to customers. But it has also gotten extremely complex, relying on a basket of new technologies to achieve results. It helps to look at it through the eyes of the three main constituencies that are affected by it: customers, contact centers and the businesses they sit in.
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Contact Center,
Customer Experience Management,
Intelligent Self-Service
Verint held its analyst conference recently, using the opportunity to flesh out how it is responding to the rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and data-related technologies and to changes in the way enterprises consider the purchasing process for contact center-related tools.
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Contact Center,
Customer Experience Management,
Intelligent Self-Service
Field service operations are not often discussed as part of enterprise customer experience planning, but there is a strong argument that they should be seen as an important factor driving how customers perceive brands. Like contact centers, field service teams are dealing with the advance of startling new technologies that can be expensive and disruptive. The flip side of disruption, though, is that it presents interesting opportunities for improving customer-related outcomes.
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Contact Center,
Customer Experience Management
The next phase of buying for contact centers and adjoining service/customer experience (CX) teams is going to be heavily influenced by how vendors develop tightly integrated ecosystems and define use cases and benefits across enterprise personas. There are more people involved in the work of delivering customer service, and a broader technology landscape from which buyers can choose their software applications. Platforms now function well beyond the communications needs of the contact center,...
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Contact Center,
agent management,
Customer Experience Management
Contact centers have collected customer feedback almost as long as there have been telephones. The simple binary question "Did I provide you with good service today," or some variation is a common feature of agent scripts that contact center leadership uses to produce snap assessments of agent performance. Today’s analytic approaches are becoming more common, producing more insightful and nuanced pictures of what customers want, raising the question of whether enterprises understand how best to...
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Voice of the Customer,
Contact Center,
Customer Feedback
The first wave of discussions around artificial intelligence (AI) in the contact center was focused on providing software buyers with a general understanding of what the technology could do. Now the conversations are becoming more specific, focused and direct. Buyers are more aware of the spectrum of available use cases and appear to be exploring how to map new tools to the particular business problems they face. Contact center buyers are approaching new technology deployments (or enhancements...
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Contact Center,
AI,
natural language processing,
agent management,
Intelligent Self-Service,
Generative AI,
Computer Vision
We are going through an analytics revolution in and around contact centers. There is more data to analyze and better tools to conduct the analysis. One important advancement is assessing customer sentiment and using it to predict (and influence) behavior. Enterprises are using customer experience programs to identify and act upon hidden "moments of leverage" where customers may be inclined or primed to make a purchase. To do that effectively, enterprises need insight into how the customer...
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Voice of the Customer,
Contact Center,
Customer Experience Management,
Intelligent Self-Service
The speed of innovation and transformation has picked up considerably in the 2020s, thanks to the confluence of artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing and the pandemic. Modern consumers have wildly different expectations than their predecessors when it comes to service delivery, whether that means a preference for digital channels and self-service or a willingness to do their own troubleshooting and research. As a result, buying an operating platform for a contact center is not a simple...
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Contact Center,
agent management,
Intelligent Self-Service
Ventana Research recently announced its Market Agenda in the expertise area of Customer Experience. CX has emerged as a way for enterprises to demonstrate value and stand out in the marketplace. The technology underlying modern CX is transitioning from tools that are based on communication to those centered on data analysis and process automation. No technology has had as dramatic impact as quickly as Generative AI, which has upended the industry. It allows enterprises to build great...
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Voice of the Customer,
Self-service,
Analytics,
Contact Center,
agent management,
Customer Experience Management,
Field Service,
AI & Machine Learning