I’ve certainly had a whirlwind start to my time as the new Lead Analyst at Opus Research. A crazy travel schedule (something like 36,000 air miles in my first few weeks) and holidays mean that I am just now settling in to process all that I’ve heard and seen. I’m going to provide a grab-bag of two ideas that require deeper analysis and action by brands looking to infuse AI into their processes to provide better customer experiences. On their face, neither of these subjects seem as exhilarating as the first time you saw something as ungainly as a helicopter fly—but these are the moments, ideas, discussions, or flippant asides that may have gone by quickly in the deluge of content at events, but that then just stuck with me. And so on to the meat of the blog:

The Contact Center Is More Than Just Agents

Despite the headlong rush enterprise and contact center leaders are in to automate seemingly every customer interaction, the low-hanging fruit for brands remains in augmenting the employees providing interaction assistance. For the most part, that has meant contact center agent assistance (with a broad definition of contact center that includes, for example, inside sales organizations). Given that the agents are the ones directly interacting with customers, this approach seems a good place to start. Agents are also the segment of contact center labor with the highest turnover, so there are a lot more novice folks in those roles who can use the help.

But the other roles in the contact center—workforce planners, team leads, quality analysts, managers and supervisors, performance teams, and so on—have a huge impact on achieving desired results. So, tech vendors should be targeting those roles for “co-pilots” and other forms of augmentations. Examples of such use cases have, however, been thin on the ground. That’s why I perked up significantly when NICE used part of its annual analyst conference to demonstrate a co-pilot function designed to help team leads and quality folks.

Here’s what such a use case could look like: the team lead is fed performance data on a group of agents. The data singles out a particular agent who has been struggling on a skill; the lead can just ask the co-pilot something like, “help me build a training program for agent Carrie Route to help her improve her call close.” The co-pilot then generates concrete suggestions that can include existing training materials, coaching language the team lead can use, pointers to e-learning courses, and even a specific order in which these steps need to be taken.

The same idea can be applied to those other non-agent roles. Workforce planners could conversationally run various simulations for creating optimal coverage. Strategic planners might game out what skills will be needed in three years and how to start designing programs for recruiting, hiring, and training the employees that would possess them. Agents are clearly the lifeblood of contact centers, but these other folks may well have a larger impact on brands’ abilities to achieve their overall strategic goals. Consequently, we hope to see many other vendors venturing down the same path as NICE here.

(For analysis of the rest of the news from NICE’s analyst event, check out the bang-up job that my colleagues Amy Stapleton and Peter Headrick did.)

CX Is More Than Just Customer Service

CCaaS providers seriously love to talk about customer experience. I get it—CX sounds much more transformative than customer service or routing or even service automation. Many vendors have gone so far as to rebrand what they do as CX. But, as the subhead says, CX is more than just customer service. CX is a consumer’s perception of their experiences with brands. One can, of course, take that concept too literally to the point of absurdity. Yes, the ugly beige color of the endcap in a drug store that I am forced to stand by as I wait in an interminable line to pick up a prescription will in some way influence my impression of my experience; no, that is not a part of CX with which an interaction-focused tech vendor need concern itself. But it is not a step too far to point out that customer service does not equal CX.

That has been a pet peeve of mine for several years. When I went on a tear about this about a year ago, a product leader at a CCaaS vendor said to me, “but it is an aspirational way to show we are hoping to influence the whole customer lifecycle.” That point landed, but, for most, that aspiration seems very distant. However, at Five9’s customer event in Barcelona last month, it was starting to become clear what it will look like when CCaaS vendors really start to expand their footprint earlier in the customer lifecycle.

Back in August, Five9 acquired Acqueon, a company that described itself as a real-time revenue execution platform. Acqueon provides outbound technology that leverages AI to personalize interactions, predict optimal outreach timing, and maximize connection rates. The goal: grow revenue while enhancing customer satisfaction and aligning with compliance standards. Or, put simply, Acqueon helps sell.

At the Barcelona event, Five9 started to show what it will look like when its core platform and its Genius AI  can become the orchestration engine for essentially every interaction and across the entire customer journey—including marketing, e-commerce, sales and customer service…y’know, pretty much all of processes that make up most of customer experience. The data, especially the contextual data, generated by Acqueon feeds into Genius AI to strengthen both the insights it derives and then provides to employees and the outputs its generates via GenAI Studio.

To be clear, it is not just that Five9 bought a vendor steeped in commerce and sales expertise; it is that it has a sensible way to incorporate that technology as an extension of its existing platforms. And these are only the first steps, of course, for Five9. Acqueon , for example, works best in environments with authenticated customers, situations in which it can tap into existing data stores. Five9 will need to move even further out in the sales cycle to using implicit data to generate insights about anonymous customers if it wants to tackle the “full” customer experience. But this event pointed the way towards CCaaS providers finally living up to the CX provider tag they have already been using.

Categories: Articles

Tags: NICE, customer expererience, CX, CCaaS, LLMs, genAI, Five9