ISG Software Research Analyst Perspectives

Calabrio Enables Contact Center Agent Productivity

Posted by Keith Dawson on 16 January 2024

Every contact center agent represents an incredible investment in time and money even before that person starts working with customers. The costs associated with the labor force — and the need to continually replace agents who leave — have long forced managers to use technology to optimize performance and processes. Much of the technology that was developed decades ago is still relevant and in... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Contact Center, agent management

Contact Centers Must Adapt to New Agent Tools and Practices

Posted by Keith Dawson on 02 January 2024

The pandemic laid bare the tenuous relationship between many contact centers and their agents. The abrupt shift to remote work was just one component of the changes still under way. The past four years have also seen enterprises reckoning with questions about how to hire, what to pay their employees, what skills are needed and how an avalanche of new technology will change their operations. ... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Contact Center, Knowledge Management, agent management

ServiceNow’s Vancouver Is a Roadmap to the Future of Service Ops

Posted by Keith Dawson on 19 December 2023

It often takes longer to adopt new technology in the customer service delivery environment than in other business areas. In fact, service operations are among the most efficient and well-organized processes (despite what consumers might think). Because both the processes and the technology that drive them are deeply engrained in many companies, many people resist large-scale transformation... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Contact Center, agent management

Verint’s AI Strategy Takes Shape

Posted by Keith Dawson on 08 December 2023

Verint’s November analyst conference was an opportunity to flesh out the strategies unveiled earlier in the year on AI deployment and on “Open CCaaS,” a moniker describing how contact centers are provisioned going forward. The company displayed notable progress, particularly in rolling out AI bots for numerous real-world applications. Open CCaaS is Verint’s way of stating to the industry that a... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Voice of the Customer, Contact Center, bots, agent management

Decoupling Interaction Routing with BYOT in Contact Center Software

Posted by Keith Dawson on 21 November 2023

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... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Voice of the Customer, Contact Center, agent management, CCaaS, ACD

NICE Puts Knowledge at the Heart of Its AI Strategy

Posted by Keith Dawson on 25 October 2023

NICE held its annual Analyst Summit this month in the magnificent high-altitude mountains of Peru, a fantastic environment in which to hear top executives share insights into the changing company and industry. NICE has been very successful in navigating the industry transition from voice-centric interactions to a digital-first posture. Consumer behavior is one of the underlying causes of this... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Voice of the Customer, Contact Center, agent management

Cultivating Contact Center, Customer Experience Thinking for Success

Posted by Keith Dawson on 12 October 2023

The environment around customer experience is being disrupted by a series of technical and organizational shifts ranging from artificial intelligence to work-from-home to deep customer analytics. When times change, it’s helpful for people to have a framework to organize their thinking and actions. I believe there are two dominant frameworks used to organize business approaches to customers. One... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Voice of the Customer, Contact Center, agent management

The Buyers Guide for Contact Centers Classifies and Rates Vendors

Posted by Keith Dawson on 19 September 2023

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 Centers 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... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Contact Center

Contact Centers Buyers Guide: Market Observations

Posted by Keith Dawson on 18 September 2023

The 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Contact Centers research enables me to provide observations about how the market has advanced. In this modern, digital age of customer experience, the journey of engagement across every channel and device must be orchestrated effectively. Organizations, no matter the industry, have inbound and outbound interactions and rely on contact centers to fulfill... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Contact Center

The Buyers Guide for Agent Management Classifies and Rates Vendors

Posted by Keith Dawson on 15 September 2023

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 Agent Management 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... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, agent management

Agent Management Buyers Guide: Market Observations

Posted by Keith Dawson on 14 September 2023

The 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Agent Management research enables me to provide observations about how the market has advanced. Agents are the foundation of the contact center processes that impact every customer experience. These processes, and the customer service function, must be able to operate from any location, at any time, and agents must be able to respond to customers via any... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, agent management

The Buyers Guide for Contact Center Suites Classifies and Rates Vendors

Posted by Keith Dawson on 13 September 2023

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... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Contact Center

Market Observations from the Contact Center Suites Buyers Guide

Posted by Keith Dawson on 12 September 2023

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. In this modern, digital age of customer experience, the journey of engagement across every channel and device must be orchestrated effectively. Organizations, no matter the industry, have inbound and outbound interactions and rely on contact... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Contact Center

Balancing Agents and Automation Enhances the Customer Experience

Posted by Keith Dawson on 16 August 2023

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... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Self-service, automation, Contact Center, Knowledge Management, agent management

Why Every Contact Center Should Have a CDP

Posted by Keith Dawson on 01 August 2023

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... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Contact Center

Verint Wants You to Think Differently About Contact Centers

Posted by Keith Dawson on 30 June 2023

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... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Voice of the Customer, Contact Center, agent management

NICE Shines Spotlight on Enlighten AI

Posted by Keith Dawson on 28 June 2023

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... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Voice of the Customer, Contact Center, agent management

Orchestrating Experiences Is a Big Lift for Contact Centers

Posted by Keith Dawson on 14 June 2023

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... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Contact Center

Zendesk Boosts AI for Enhanced Customer Engagement

Posted by Keith Dawson on 31 May 2023

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... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Contact Center

The Path to Generative AI to Boost Contact Center Agent Performance

Posted by Keith Dawson on 16 May 2023

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... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Contact Center, agent management, AI and Machine Learning