ISG Software Research Analyst Perspectives

Subscription Pricing Changing for Sustained Customer Growth

Posted by Stephen Hurrell on 20 May 2021

Subscription pricing models are no longer new. Many companies have experience with this pricing model even if there has not been complete adoption across their entire product and service offerings. Companies that use this model, or have spent time looking at the approach, understand the approach of a recurring revenue stream based on a repeating flat fee. By 2025, over one-fifth of organizations... Read More

Topics: Performance Management, Sales, Customer Experience, Marketing, Office of Finance, Financial Performance Management, Price and Revenue Management, Digital Commerce, Predictive Planning, Subscription Management

Zoho Builds a CX Suite Inside Zoho One

Posted by Keith Dawson on 11 May 2021

There are many software components that facilitate contact center operations. Historically, the industry has relied, in part, on niche or best-of-breed applications but this is shifting in favor of broadly integrated suites or ecosystems. When we look at CX trends beyond the contact center, the shift is even more pronounced, with the bundling/collection of applications from martech to... Read More

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

The Voice of the Customer Is Really a Chorus of Voices

Posted by Keith Dawson on 04 May 2021

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a catch-all term that refers to the collection of customer feedback in various formats. Sometimes this feedback is in the form of quick surveys or reactions to questions like, "Did I resolve your issue today?" or "Would you recommend our service to a friend?" Alternatively, it can be derived from less specific but more numerous data signals that span multiple... Read More

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

Avaya: Adapting and Focused on CX, CCaaS Success

Posted by Keith Dawson on 22 April 2021

Business phone systems and contact center platforms received renewed attention in 2020 as organizations acquired tools for agents working from home. That put the spotlight on vendors, like Avaya, that have feet in both worlds. Since both forms of communications technology are well-suited to the cloud, Avaya has developed its Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a... Read More

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

The Experience of Digital Commerce

Posted by Stephen Hurrell on 09 April 2021

Digital commerce affects almost everyone’s lives. It is hard to remember a time when one could not sign on to a website like Amazon, order a product, pay for it and have it delivered to your front door within days, not weeks. Although catalogues have been around for a century or so, the digital-commerce revolution has changed the way we think about shopping for many of our everyday and special... Read More

Topics: Sales, Customer Experience, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Product Information Management, Price and Revenue Management, Digital Commerce, AI and Machine Learning

8x8 Shows Why CCaaS and UCaaS Should be Unified

Posted by Keith Dawson on 30 March 2021

The pandemic accelerated several trends in the contact-center industry that were already underway, chiefly: moving infrastructure and software applications to the cloud, and rethinking the process of managing agents. One byproduct of these trends is a renewed look at the similarities between business-phone systems (also known as unified communications, or UC) and contact center systems (CC).... Read More

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

Salesforce Service Cloud: Contact Center with Workforce Engagement

Posted by Keith Dawson on 24 March 2021

The modern contact center relies heavily on software that enables agents to perform multiple complex tasks while simultaneously managing the customer-facing side of interactions. This has allowed CRM vendors to build tools, such as agent desktop interfaces, that control virtually all aspects of the service environment. Salesforce has been steadily growing its influence over the service... Read More

Topics: Sales, Customer Experience, Voice of the Customer, Contact Center, Sales Performance Management, Workforce Management, agent management, sales enablement

The Mandate for Contact Center and Agent Management

Posted by Keith Dawson on 22 March 2021

The ways in which consumers engage with organizations have changed. Long-established communication channels such as the telephone, email and company websites are still used, but many consumers now prefer to use text messages, online chat, social media, virtual agents and applications on their mobile devices to contact the company and address issues. As a result, organizations have had to add... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Contact Center, agent management

Content Guru Brings CCaaS with Confidence to US

Posted by Keith Dawson on 19 March 2021

Shifts in the market due to the pandemic have upended the contact center marketplace, accelerating the inevitable migration of infrastructure to the cloud and changing the way agents are managed. The pandemic also increased the dependence customers have on contact centers in the absence of in-store buying. This has made it an interesting time to be a Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) vendor.... Read More

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

Customer Data Platforms: Essential for Effective Customer Experience

Posted by Keith Dawson on 16 March 2021

Since customer data platforms (CDP) emerged in the marketplace about five years ago, there has been debate about what roles they fill, especially within customer service organizations. They were originally developed by small software firms to provide marketing teams with a comprehensive view of customer records. Those records could be scattered throughout an organization, siloed by system and... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Marketing, data artisan, Data Governance, Data Lake, Data Preparation, Data, Information Management (IM), intelligent marketing

The New Verint: Experiences and Engagement with Customers

Posted by Keith Dawson on 12 March 2021

Verint has recently separated into two companies, one of which is a dedicated provider of software focused on customer engagement and will keep the Verint name. (The other is called Cognyte and focused on security analytics.) There are many reasons for the split but key among them is a long-term change in how organizations procure software designed to engage customers and handle interactions... Read More

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

SAP Service Cloud Bridges the Contact Center and the Back Office

Posted by Keith Dawson on 04 March 2021

The contact center is still, for most businesses, where customer experience is designed, delivered and measured. And as we might expect, customer experience (CX) tools are migrating from where they started point solutions based on narrow functions into broader suites that encompass multi-departmental functions and reach across customer journeys. The goal is to provide more consistency across... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Marketing, Voice of the Customer, Contact Center, Digital Commerce, Enterprise Resource Planning, agent management

The 2021 Market Agenda for Customer Experience: Achieving Excellence in Engagement

Posted by Keith Dawson on 24 February 2021

Ventana Research recently announced its 2021 market agenda in the expertise area of Customer Experience. Most organizations have some degree of focus on managing how they interact with their customers, but it is often a disjointed and constrained process. Developing an effective customer experience has become an investment priority in recent years as organizations increasingly recognize the... Read More

Topics: Sales, Customer Experience, Marketing, Voice of the Customer, Analytics, Customer Service, Contact Center, Workforce Management, Digital Marketing, Digital Commerce, agent management, AI and Machine Learning

The Ventana Research 2021 Market Agenda: How Digital Effectiveness Impacts Organizational Agility

Posted by Mark Smith on 17 February 2021

Ventana Research has announced its market agenda for 2021, continuing the tradition of transparency in our efforts to educate and guide the technology market but also our independence as we do not share our market agenda or analyst perspectives with any external party. Each year, we proudly formulate our market agenda that is not biased by clients or the technology industry, focusing on education... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Human Capital Management, Marketing, Office of Finance, Analytics, Data, Digital Technology, Operations & Supply Chain, Office of Revenue

How to Take Advantage of AI/ML Today

Posted by David Menninger on 08 February 2021

The industry is making huge strides with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). There is more data available to analyze. Analytics vendors have made it easier to build and deploy models, and AI/ML is being embedded into many types of applications. Organizations are realizing the value that AI/ML provides and there are now millions of professionals with AI or ML in their title or... Read More

Topics: Sales, Customer Experience, Marketing, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Data Preparation, Digital Technology, AI and Machine Learning

The Opportunity for CX is Beyond Your Contact Center

Posted by Keith Dawson on 26 January 2021

The contact center has long represented the starting point for customer experience initiatives. Now, however, most organizations are finding that they need to invest beyond this singular point of engagement. When organizations look at customer experience holistically, they see the need to incorporate the perspectives of people in other departments and channels of customer engagement. These... Read More

Topics: Sales, Customer Experience, Marketing, Contact Center

Intelligent Virtual Agents Are an Imperative for Digital Self-Service

Posted by Keith Dawson on 22 December 2020

The pandemic has raised the stakes for self-service in every part of the customer journey. In 2020, the customer service industry underwent a shock to its collective system by pulling up stakes and moving agents to remote work. At the same time, consumers moved away from in-person interactions in stores and branches. This systemic disruption has led to longer call wait times and tougher... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Contact Center, Digital Technology, natural language processing, Conversational Computing, agent management, AI and Machine Learning

Teradata Vantage CX: The Real Customer Data Platform

Posted by Keith Dawson on 08 December 2020

Teradata is not a name that is commonly associated with the customer experience marketplace, but that is likely to change as customer experience (CX) practitioners wrestle with the problems created by the multiple streams of data thrown off by the many applications and customer touchpoints they have to manage. Teradata’s Vantage CX is a tool for ingesting and managing customer information at... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Marketing, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Contact Center, Data, Digital Marketing, Digital Commerce, intelligent marketing, AI and Machine Learning

Trends in Contact Center Market for 2020 and Beyond

Posted by Keith Dawson on 22 October 2020

This has been a dramatic year for contact centers. The underlying technology has been changing for some time, but that change is now accelerating because of the urgent operational shifts forced by the pandemic. When you can’t gather dozens or hundreds of people into a single, open-plan site, you must look at alternative models for staffing and interaction handling. You must also work harder to... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Voice of the Customer, Analytics, Contact Center, Product Information Management, Digital Commerce, Subscription Management, agent management, AI and Machine Learning

Reltio Connected Customer 360 earns our 13th Digital Innovation Award for Marketing

Posted by Mark Smith on 21 October 2020

The annual Ventana Research Digital Innovation Awards showcases advances in the productivity and potential of business applications, as well as technology that contributes significantly to improved efficiency and productivity in the processes and the performance of an organization. Our goal is to recognize technology and vendors that have introduced noteworthy digital innovations that advance... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Marketing, Digital Marketing, Digital Commerce