ISG Software Research Analyst Perspectives

Why Outbound Is a Smart Channel for Customer Communication

Posted by Keith Dawson on 13 September 2022

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... Read More

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

Preparing Agents for Success in Automated, Distributed Contact Centers

Posted by Keith Dawson on 04 August 2022

The contact center industry is reexamining how organizations engage with contact center agents. One thing that we learned from the forced movement to work-from-home was that organizations have to provide agents with appropriate tools to collaborate and communicate with peers and supervisors as well as workers in the back office who participate in all sorts of customer-facing or customer-adjacent... Read More

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

Field Service Heads for Greater Automation and Integration

Posted by Keith Dawson on 26 July 2022

Field service is a segment of customer experience that is dominated by two elements: the complexity of the issues handled, and the high cost of providing on-site services. It is recognized as a critical component of the service experience, especially when managing the condition of high-precision equipment in the medical, manufacturing and utility industries. It is also a high-risk moment in the... Read More

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

Work-From-Anywhere Has a Communications Impact

Posted by Keith Dawson on 10 May 2022

Contact centers are undergoing a radical reshuffling of the workforce, partly because the pandemic shifted agents to remote work. But the trends were in place to reorganize the world of work long before the pandemic. Digital contact channels, which are gaining in popularity, require workers that are better informed and capable of handling more complex and interdependent interactions and... Read More

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

Why We Need a New Definition for CX Software Platforms

Posted by Keith Dawson on 18 March 2022

The technology underpinning customer experience (CX) is a hodgepodge of tools that have been developed for niche use cases and then expanded to fill broader roles. Examples include the old (CRM, help desk software and speech analytics) and the new (customer data platforms and conversational AI). This is because CX is a set of very specialized processes that happen in different parts of the... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Marketing, Marketing Performance Management, Voice of the Customer, Contact Center, Product Information Management, Digital Marketing, agent management, intelligent marketing, Digital Experience Platform

Contact Center Cost Control, Part 2: Getting Granular

Posted by Keith Dawson on 01 March 2022

In a previous Analyst Perspective, we discussed some of the big-picture trends that are bringing cost control back as a core driver of contact center operations. In this report we will tackle some of the practical ramifications: how those trends affect decision-making and operations. The pandemic opened the door to a much broader consideration of how organizations engage with employees,... Read More

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

Contact Center Cost Control, Part 1: Rethinking Modern Operations

Posted by Keith Dawson on 22 February 2022

Contact centers have always been very cost-centric and attuned to the kinds of constraints that they have to operate in, but many organizations were diverted from that kind of focus when the pandemic first hit. In 2020, there was a sudden need for new tools and equipment just to keep centers running, and the costs involved in enabling agents to work from home — equipping them and their... Read More

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

Top Trends in VoC Analytics

Posted by Keith Dawson on 16 February 2022

A formal Voice of the Customer (VoC) program is a necessity for any organization that wants to grow its customer base and differentiate from its competitors. Unfortunately, many organizations have not updated their notion of “formal” in quite a few years. VoC has a contact center component and an enterprise component. They are related, hopefully connected, but not the same. Contact centers are... Read More

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

The 2022 Market Agenda for CX: Enabling Resilience in Experiences

Posted by Keith Dawson on 02 February 2022

Ventana Research recently announced its Market Agenda in the expertise area of Customer Experience. For the past several years, many organizations have found it challenging to provide excellent customer experiences in the face of drastic technology changes and the ongoing pandemic. These challenges have highlighted for many decision-makers how strategic CX can be in differentiating from... Read More

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

Shifts in Agent Management Software Benefit Agent Experiences

Posted by Keith Dawson on 26 January 2022

The 2022 Ventana Research Value Index for agent management software is published, offering interesting observations about how the market is advancing to provide more sophistication to agents and the management of them. The market is now characterized by applications integrated into multifunction suites, a significant change accelerated by the pandemic in the short term and vendor consolidation... Read More

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

Automating Workflows for a Better Customer Experience

Posted by Keith Dawson on 01 December 2021

Any organization that relies heavily on a large labor force looks to automation to reduce costs, and contact centers are no exception. They handle interactions at such large scale that almost any effort to automate some part of the process can deliver measurable efficiencies. Two factors have ratcheted up attention on automating customer experience workflows: the dramatic expansion of digital... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Voice of the Customer, Analytics, Data Integration, Contact Center, Data, agent management, data operations, Experience Management, AI and Machine Learning

Vonage Buys Into Conversational Commerce With Jumper.ai

Posted by Keith Dawson on 12 November 2021

When migrating their communications stacks to the cloud, many organizations come face to face with a quandary: do they emphasize the business phone system and gravitate toward a unified communications vendor? Or should they focus on the specific applications needed for running their contact centers and seek out a CCaaS vendor? It turns out there is a third option, which is to build their own... Read More

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

NICE CXi Is a Pivot to the Post-Contact Center World

Posted by Keith Dawson on 04 November 2021

When NICE acquired inContact in 2016, it began a transformation that saw it broaden its product offering and positioned itself to play a larger role in the contact center and customer experience industries. It was a prescient move, creating a firm that could supply end-to-end contact center functionality in the cloud. And it anticipated today’s market dynamic, in which NICE and its competitors... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Voice of the Customer, Business Continuity, Analytics, Contact Center, Data, Digital transformation, agent management, Experience Management, AI and Machine Learning

AI’s Value to Contact Centers: What Are the Use Cases

Posted by Keith Dawson on 28 October 2021

In part one of this Analyst Perspective on the use of artificial intelligence within contact center applications, we focused on the evolution — and resulting benefits — of tools embedded with AI, including ease-of-use for non-data-scientists. In this Analyst Perspective, we’ll explore the most beneficial applications of this technology in contact centers. To understand how contact centers... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Voice of the Customer, Analytics, agent management, AI and Machine Learning

The Digital Awakening of Business Process Intelligence

Posted by Mark Smith on 21 October 2021

The work environment today demands that your organization advances the efficiency to execute business processes for continuous operations to have a positive impact on business performance. The capability to be responsive to any range of minor to disruptive business events is required to support business continuity and level of organizational readiness to meet the needs of digital business.... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Voice of the Customer, embedded analytics, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Contact Center, Data, Digital Technology, Operations & Supply Chain, Enterprise Resource Planning, Digital transformation, natural language processing, continuous supply chain, agent management, Process Mining, Streaming Analytics, Experience Management, AI and Machine Learning

AI’s Value to Contact Centers: Improved Customer and Agent Experiences

Posted by Keith Dawson on 21 October 2021

When artificial intelligence emerged from the labs and vendors started offering it as a component of their software, many contact-center buyers shied away from it. From their point of view, AI and machine learning tools were new, expensive, relatively untested and had an uncertain use case. This stance was understandable, as contact center professionals are traditionally expected to be... Read More

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

Calabrio Brings VoC to Larger CX Potential

Posted by Keith Dawson on 14 October 2021

Tools for contact center agent management have changed considerably in the past few years. The suite of software applications has grown from those that perform core functions in scheduling and quality control to include more advanced solutions for agent guidance, integrated desktops, and workflow and automation design. One area of intense investment by vendors has been analytics, specifically for... Read More

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

The Pandemic Heightens Need for Agent Management

Posted by Keith Dawson on 24 September 2021

The primary effect of the pandemic on agent/workforce management beginning in 2020 was a rush to re-site and re-equip contact centers and agents. This was achieved with a surprising speed and smoothness industrywide. But once achieved on a “temporary” or “emergency” basis, it became clear that this shift was going to be semi-permanent. Even if the majority of the agent population moves back into... Read More

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

Uniphore Automates Intelligent Conversations

Posted by Keith Dawson on 16 September 2021

Customer support operations increasingly rely on automation and complex workflow processes to reduce costs and improve experiences. Automation also allows organizations to make their service processes richer, incorporating information and staff from back offices, for example, or embedding conversational tools into contact center processes. Uniphore is a technology provider that focuses on using... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, embedded analytics, Analytics, Contact Center, natural language processing, agent management, Process Mining, Streaming Analytics, AI and Machine Learning

Dialpad Stresses the Unity of UCaaS and CCaaS

Posted by Keith Dawson on 25 August 2021

Dialpad provides contact center and business phone services, a market that is in transition due to a convergence of technologies and business conditions. Although Contact Center as a Service and Unified Communications as a Service are designed in a similar way, they have always served different functions and purposes and been pitched to separate buyers. While UCaaS improves and streamlines... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Voice of the Customer, Analytics, Collaboration, Contact Center, natural language processing, agent management, AI and Machine Learning