Analyst Perspectives

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research 2023 Contact Center Suites Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by Ventana Research. Drawing on our Benchmark Research, we apply a structured methodology built on evaluation categories that reflect the...

The 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Contact Center Suites research enables me to share some of my observations about how the market has advanced.

A lot of conversations around contact centers deal with automation, particularly how to balance the way humans and automated systems work together. Self-service, the front end of the customer interaction, is where practitioners get a first taste of the marvels of increasingly advanced automation. As customer expectations ramped up and labor became more costly during the pandemic, deflecting...

In a relatively short time, customer data platforms (CDPs) have become default components of the contact center tech stack. This is an important development for contact center practitioners because it reflects the fact that customer data is essential to maintaining productive customer relationships. It also provides an on-ramp for organizations to establish a sensible data strategy if they have...

Verint came to its Engage customer conference in June with the goal of changing the industry’s conversation around Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS). The industry commonly considers CCaaS to be equivalent to cloud-based voice routing, an old and perhaps outdated way of thinking about provisioning contact centers. Verint wants to flip the narrative: voice routing is not special enough anymore to...

Since acquiring InContact in 2016, NICE has moved far from its roots in call recording and contact center quality optimization. That acquisition birthed what was effectively a hybrid that married cloud contact center operations (CCaaS) with a focus on advanced customer experience (CX) analytics. NICE held its annual customer event, Interactions 2023, in June in New York, gathering end users to...

The underlying idea behind trying to manage customer experiences is that of the journey: that customers follow a path through distinct stages, with different needs and modes of contact at each stage. The default mode for controlling experiences has long been to react to what the customer does and, to a great extent, build an enormous and costly infrastructure around having to wait for customers...

Zendesk held its customer conference – Relate – along with a session for industry analysts in May. Zendesk develops software primarily for customer service and support and automating aspects of the sales process through customer relationship management. The conference presented an opportunity for Zendesk to showcase several new technology developments that it hopes will solidify its position in...

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become ubiquitous in discussions of contact center technology. Vendors are rushing to incorporate it into platforms and applications. And end users have understandably mixed feelings about where it makes sense to use and what its impacts will be. No one should be surprised that AI has arrived, especially for customer support: Software companies have been working...

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.

Contact centers have long collected feedback from customers, usually through short surveys. It is very common for an agent or an automated system to ask for an assessment of the interaction that just occurred, hoping to get the customer's candid, instant view of whether they were satisfied. For the most part, what's learned in those short engagements is very narrow. It can be used for a customer...

Organizations looking to improve the customer experience and contact center operations should closely examine the processes at work in the front-end self-service environment. Technology advancements are converging at this gateway, including artificial intelligence, chatbots and knowledge management. The front end of the customer interaction offers a greater opportunity for customer engagement...

Modern business relies on having a clear, continuous understanding of customer perceptions and intentions. That insight is increasingly used to deliver them experiences that they would consider excellent, in turn leading to higher satisfaction and more profitable relationships. Qualtrics, a provider of Experience Management (XM) software, focuses on creating applications that analyze customer...

At its March 2023 analyst conference, 8x8 described a significant pivot in its focus. Going forward the company will be emphasizing the Contact Center (CCaaS) side of its portfolio, which to this point has represented a small portion of its overall sales. It made several product announcements to bolster the argument that it can effectively meet the needs of complex contact center operations while...

Contact centers are very often keen on optimizing their costs through automation. Technology vendors supplying this market have recognized this need, and in the past few years, they have been putting workflow and automation tools front and center in their offerings. This has raised some questions among practitioners about the most effective strategies for implementing automated processes.

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...

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Value Index research, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The 2023 Ventana Research Value Index: Customer Experience Management is the distillation of a year of market and product research by Ventana Research. Drawing on our Benchmark Research, we apply a structured methodology built on evaluation categories...

Ventana Research recently announced its 2023 Market Agenda in the expertise area of Marketing, continuing the guidance we have offered for nearly two decades to help organizations derive optimal value from business technology and improve outcomes.

Having just completed the 2023 Ventana Research Value Index for Customer Experience Management, I want to share some of my observations about how the market has developed. We found that there are many tools available for various needs related to customer management and communication, ranging from marketing tools to contact center systems to data and analytics applications. It is rare to find all...

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...