ISG Software Research Analyst Perspectives

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 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

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

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

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

Why Intelligent Self-Service Is the Tip of the Spear for CX

Posted by Keith Dawson on 29 March 2023

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... Read More

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

Qualtrics XM Platform Zeros in on Customer Experiences

Posted by Keith Dawson on 27 March 2023

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... Read More

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

Making Automation Easier for Contact Centers

Posted by Keith Dawson on 02 March 2023

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. Based... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Contact Center, agent management

The 2023 Value Index for Customer Experience Management: Vendor and Product Ratings

Posted by Keith Dawson on 25 January 2023

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... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Voice of the Customer, Contact Center, Product Information Management, Digital Commerce, Subscription Management, agent management

All-Inclusive CX Suites Reveal the Big Picture to Optimize CX Management

Posted by Keith Dawson on 19 January 2023

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... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Voice of the Customer, Contact Center, Product Information Management, Digital Commerce, Subscription Management, agent management

The 2023 Market Agenda for CX: Analytics Takes Center Stage

Posted by Keith Dawson on 12 January 2023

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... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Voice of the Customer, CEM, Self-service, Analytics, Contact Center, agent management, AI and Machine Learning

Verint Bets Big on Engagement Automation and Intelligence

Posted by Keith Dawson on 11 January 2023

Since 2021, Verint’s message to the customer experience community has focused on the “engagement capacity gap,” a way of describing how the available resources for CX clash with the high level of customer expectations. The argument is that efforts to close that gap require a rethink of how contact centers (and their parent organizations) operate and plan. At Verint’s December analyst conference,... Read More

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

The CCaaS Business Case Shifts from Costs to Capabilities

Posted by Keith Dawson on 14 December 2022

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,... Read More

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

Optimizing Customer Communication Channels

Posted by Keith Dawson on 09 November 2022

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... Read More

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

NICE Elevates Power of Customer Experiences

Posted by Mark Smith on 02 November 2022

Pressures to engage consumers through every interaction and provide a delightful customer experience are influencing advancements in business and technology. Organizations are challenged to manage friction points experienced by billions of consumers amid expanding digital channels. These issues must be addressed to engage and respond to customers every second of the day. We assert that, through... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Contact Center, agent management

Contact Centers Should Revisit KPIs for Strategic Relevance

Posted by Keith Dawson on 02 November 2022

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... Read More

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

Technology is Only Part of the Customer Experience Transformation

Posted by Keith Dawson on 06 October 2022

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... Read More

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

Agent Performance Management Changes With the Times

Posted by Keith Dawson on 20 September 2022

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. In many respects, the nature of the agent’s job has changed. Instead of being... Read More

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