Keith Dawson's Analyst Perspectives

For at least five years, it has been clear that innovation in technology for communication and business processes is accelerating. This year, that trend has been especially notable with the explosive emergence of artificial intelligence in the contact center software market. But what tends to get lost in the excitement around innovation is what sits downstream of the development process: the impact of new technology on how buyers organize the processes and the disruption that new technology...

Organizations are increasingly seeing the strategic benefits of enhanced customer engagement. But many are struggling to understand how to put a broader customer experience strategy into practice amid siloed processes and departments. Particularly in contact centers, new technology has to be melded onto existing platforms in ways that enhance experiences without disrupting operations.

The Internet of Things describes machines and objects that are enhanced with sensors and communication connections, enabling them to report on their operational status, including outages, faults or threshold conditions that require attention. The technology has gradually made its way into business and consumer systems over the past decade. Today, these connected devices are playing an important role in customer experience processes such as field service.

Ventana Research recently announced its Market Agenda in the expertise area of Customer Experience. CX has emerged as a way for organizations 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. This allows organizations to build great experiences and reap the benefits in customer loyalty and value. It also forces companies to reckon with...

The market and buyer landscape for contact center operating services has changed significantly since the onset of the pandemic, now almost three years ago. Three years would have been enough time for some significant shifts, even without the pressure the pandemic put on service operations. Nevertheless, with on-premises systems now taking a backseat industrywide, it’s fair to say that CCaaS, which typically refers to cloud-based systems, now represents the lions’ share of spending and therefore...

For quite a few years now, two trends have put the contact center on a collision course. First, the technology used to handle customer inquiries has been evolving quickly, moving organizations farther and farther away from the traditional mode of primarily answering voice calls. At the same time, consumers have become much more demanding. There’s no doubt that customers are more likely to use quality of service as a gauge for whether they should continue doing business with an organization....

Traditional key performance indicators used for performance measurement in contact centers are no longer sufficient. These outdated standards don’t reliably inform mid- and upper-level leadership about the true impact of agent work and behavior. Organizations should begin to expand the notion of what’s important in order to make the contact center a stronger organizational institution, more closely tied to others who impact the customer experience. Outside the contact center, people are keen to...

Through 2025, establishing customer experience application suites on a common platform will be the focal point of the drive to optimize customer and organizational engagement. Organizations that are passionate about improving the customer experience are choosing to empower processes and people with intelligence through smarter applications that embrace analytics, artificial intelligence and automation to personalize and optimize the customer journey, whatever the channel of customer choice.

Today’s contact centers need to revisit core assumptions around measuring agent performance. Changes in business conditions influencing agent engagement raise new questions about whether traditional performance models are sufficient to address the more complex customer needs that have taken center stage in recent years.

Outbound communication is used in a number of different contexts. For potential customers, traditional telemarketing still exists, though it is limited these days due to its minimal effectiveness. Instead, many customer-experience planners have substituted digital outbound over voice for lead generation and nurturing campaigns. Customers find text messages in the channel of their choice to be much less intrusive, and they are considerably less expensive than having contact center agents reach...