ISG Software Research Analyst Perspectives

Contact Centers Are an Industry in Denial

Posted by Keith Dawson on 21 April 2026

I recently attended Enterprise Connect, a significant industry conference covering contact centers, customer experience (CX) and telephony. I wrote my initial coverage here. Now, a few weeks later, I’d like to offer some thoughts about what my observations mean and where the industry goes from here. I’ve been covering this industry for 36 years, as a journalist and an analyst. Decades of... Read More

Topics: Contact Center, Customers and CX - Business & Technologies

Enterprise Connect Shows a CX Industry in Transition

Posted by Keith Dawson on 07 April 2026

Industries change with the times, and so it is with the conferences and events that support those industries. Enterprise Connect is not what it once was, either in terms of attendance or influence, but it is still the place where many (not most) of the key providers in contact centers and customer experience (CX) convene. It’s been described as a place where providers meet with and seek out... Read More

Topics: Contact Center, Verint, Customer Experience Management, Customers and CX - Business & Technologies, Conversational Intelligence, Salesforce, Enterprise Connect, AWS, Dialpad, UJET, Zoom

New Contact Center, New Roles to Fill

Posted by Keith Dawson on 01 April 2026

You can’t upend the entire technological infrastructure for an industry without seeing some ramifications in the form of personnel shifting and dislocation. Contact centers are smack in the middle of a transformation that is remaking the toolset and forcing businesses to rethink both the fundamental purpose of their centers and the mix of managerial and operational employees. Let’s consider how... Read More

Topics: WFM, Contact Center, Workforce Management, agent management, Customers and CX - Business & Technologies, Conversational Intelligence, QM, Quality, CSR

CX Buyers Are Understandably Confused by Pricing

Posted by Keith Dawson on 19 March 2026

There is a growing sense of confusion and uncertainty among buyers when it comes to pricing for customer experience (CX) and contact center technology. Pricing does become more complex when technology innovates, creating broader options for mixing and matching features or more choices of the types of platforms people can use. In this industry, conditions have changed so quickly that the array of... Read More

Topics: Contact Center, agent management, Customer Experience Management, Customers and CX - Business & Technologies, Conversational Intelligence, Pricing, Resolution-Based, Outcome-Based

Five9 Bets on Integrations and Partners as the Path From CCaaS to CX

Posted by Keith Dawson on 11 March 2026

It’s clear that the buyer requirements for Contact-Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) products have moved well beyond traditional notions of “cloud” or “omnichannel” and now focus on how well software providers can make artificial intelligence (AI) workflows real. The differentiation among CCaaS platforms is not so much about how well interactions are handled, but how the platforms embed within complex... Read More

Topics: Operations, Five9, automation, Contact Center, agent management, Customer Experience Management, CCaaS, Generative AI, Customers and CX - Business & Technologies, Workflow, ServiceNow, Salesforce

Talkdesk Sees the Future of Service in CX Automation

Posted by Keith Dawson on 03 March 2026

Contact center software is evolving faster than the companies that make it. The tools that operated centers remained very stable for decades and then in a very rapid period shifted away from voice and telephony towards digital interactions and broader forms of customer engagement. It’s been a natural, even expected, transition, given how the rest of the software universe has injected artificial... Read More

Topics: Contact Center, Customer Experience Management, Intelligent Self-Service, Customers and CX - Business & Technologies, Conversational Intelligence

How Genesys Navigates a Post-CCaaS Era

Posted by Keith Dawson on 25 February 2026

It’s increasingly clear that, for software providers, focusing exclusively on contact center operations is a pathway to oblivion. Voice is no longer the organizing principle around which businesses structure their customer support—instead, we are fully in a world where automated self-service is the default and digital interactions are the norm. Enterprise buyers looking to modernize their contact... Read More

Topics: Contact Center, agent management, Intelligent Self-Service, Customers and CX - Business & Technologies

Trends in Field Service Management

Posted by Keith Dawson on 12 February 2026

Enterprise customer experience (CX) usually focuses on the moment of communication between a customer and a business, assessing the customer’s state of mind and the outcomes of specific, limited interactions. But there’s another important context that drives customer behavior, and that’s the on-site experience of technical support. Field service is often out of the line of sight of CX planners,... Read More

Topics: Internet of Things, IOT, Augmented Reality, AR, Customers and CX - Business & Technologies, Field Service Management, Technician

Zoho Isn’t Really CCaaS, but That Distinction Doesn’t Matter

Posted by Keith Dawson on 28 January 2026

There are many reasons why the contact center market is in flux, but chief among them is the drive towards convergence: traditional telephony, digital channels, customer relationship management (CRM), workforce tools and analytics are expected to operate as a unified system, rather than as a set of disconnected point solutions. This creates a problem for enterprises: how to modernize their... Read More

Topics: Contact Center, Customer Experience Management, CCaaS, Customers and CX - Business & Technologies, Zoho

Challenges for CX Leadership Ahead

Posted by Keith Dawson on 11 December 2025

It’s clear that the contact center industry is experiencing a generational technological transformation. The effects of artificial intelligence (AI) and the automation it delivers have been extraordinary. But this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. People with long memories can recall the disruptive effects of CTI, for example, which enabled screen pops and integration of... Read More

Topics: Analytics, Contact Center, Customer Experience Management, Generative AI, Customers and CX - Business & Technologies

Rethinking Fundamental Contact Center Software

Posted by Keith Dawson on 19 November 2025

There is a shift underway in how enterprises structure their software stacks in relation to contact centers. Multiple factors have coalesced to reduce the importance of the traditional call handling infrastructure (i.e., the ACD) as the foundational element of the tech stack. It no longer has to be the focus of buying or deployment decisions. It’s been superseded by a more extensible (but... Read More

Topics: Analytics, Contact Center, agent management, CCaaS, ACD, Generative AI, Customers and CX - Business & Technologies

NiCE Clarifies AI Strategy in Cognigy’s Wake

Posted by Keith Dawson on 12 November 2025

Analyst summits are not where software providers go to make news, it’s where they seek to clarify and validate what they’ve already done and lay out strategies for the future. October’s NiCE summit in Vienna was an opportunity to take stock of the enormous changes artificial intelligence (AI) has wrought in the service industry and put NiCE’s recent moves into context. It’s no exaggeration to say... Read More

Topics: automation, Contact Center, agent management, Customer Experience Management, CCaaS, Intelligent Self-Service, Customers and CX - Business & Technologies, Conversational Intelligence, NiCE, Cognigy

Verint Uniquely Advances AI for CX with New Ownership

Posted by Keith Dawson on 15 October 2025

Verint held its annual Engage conference in September, shortly after it announced the news that it had agreed to be acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $2 billion. The new ownership plans on merging Verint with its competitor, Calabrio, after the deal closes in 2026. That sequence of events raises many important questions about the direction of both companies and the sector... Read More

Topics: automation, Contact Center, Verint, agent management, Customer Experience Management, CCaaS, Intelligent Self-Service, Customers and CX - Business & Technologies, Conversational Intelligence

Why Customer Journeys Matter to Enterprise CX

Posted by Keith Dawson on 30 September 2025

The idea of customer experience (CX) as a business practice relies heavily on being able to understand and track customer journeys. And that can be tricky because there isn’t a standard definition as to what a journey consists of. For example, inside a contact center the journey is perceived in terms of the steps a customer takes to achieve a particular result. Sometimes that is broadened out to... Read More

Topics: Contact Center, Field Service, CXM, Customers and CX - Business & Technologies, Customer Journey, Journey Management

Zendesk Illustrates How CCaaS Becomes CX

Posted by Keith Dawson on 24 September 2025

When building or outfitting a contact center, the core question that must be answered is: what software provider or system is foundational? For decades, the fundamental element was the routing engine, but as technology moved to the cloud, the primacy of the voice ACD receded. As it did, it became possible to conceive of a tech stack that’s not organized around routing but instead is focused on... Read More

Topics: Contact Center, Customer Experience Management, CCaaS, Customers and CX - Business & Technologies, Conversational Intelligence, Zendesk

How Contact Centers Will Use Agentic AI for CX

Posted by Keith Dawson on 27 August 2025

I am struck by the blizzard of software announcements this year describing new features for CX tools that are “agentic,” meaning autonomous tools take actions without (much) human intervention. Industry conversation about agentic AI has proceeded ahead of clarifying definitions and a sense of how it fits on a continuum of rapid AI development. I’m not sure that everything currently described as... Read More

Topics: Analytics, Contact Center, Personalization, Customer Experience Management, Generative AI, Customers and CX - Business & Technologies, Agentic AI, Transformation, Disruption

The Tricky Relationship Between Personalization and Customer Loyalty

Posted by Keith Dawson on 30 July 2025

There is an industry assumption, call it a consensus, that increasing the degree of personalization in customer interactions is beneficial: it improves loyalty, lifetime value, CSAT and other key metrics. Core to this assumption is that it benefits both the customer and the business. Whether or not that’s actually true is somewhat beside the point. The fact is that the industry has identified a... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Contact Center, NPS, Personalization, Customer Experience Management, Orchestration, Customers and CX - Business & Technologies, Conversational Intelligence, Customer Journey, Loyalty, CSAT

Adobe Applies Agentic AI to Customer Journeys

Posted by Keith Dawson on 04 June 2025

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed the idea of customer experience (CX) from a piecemeal, manually directed practice into a more streamlined and disciplined activity. The available technology has become so diverse and expansive that it is allowing enterprises to cope with a two-headed problem: providing more personalized and effective experiences is complex, and once... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience Management, Customer Journey, Adobe

Conversational Automation’s Impact on AI and CX

Posted by Keith Dawson on 15 May 2025

Conversational automation is one of those software segments that means something different depending on who you are or your role in an organization. According to my colleague Jeff Orr, the core of the idea is that conversational automation tools benefit from artificial intelligence (AI), allowing software agents, chatbots and virtual assistants to automate customer interactions and internal... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Contact Center, Intelligent Self-Service, Conversational Intelligence

The Consequences of AI-Induced Head Count Reduction for Contact Centers

Posted by Keith Dawson on 08 May 2025

Most of the discussion and planning around artificial intelligence (AI) tools for contact centers and CX has focused on finding appropriate use cases and understanding how to deploy these tools. There are already plenty of success stories about enterprises reducing friction for agents, saving time and expanding the breadth of interactions that can be handled automatically. Now that most people... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Contact Center, Business, agent management, Intelligent Self-Service, Conversational Intelligence