The CCaaS space is heating up, with several market trends adding coals to the furnace.
Indeed, legacy vendors are becoming increasingly eager to push contact centers to the cloud.
Moreover, a host of three-year CCaaS contracts are expiring after the initial rush to the cloud brought on by the pandemic.
As such, many CCaaS vendors anticipate a swarm of new interest and are leveraging AI advancements to fuel innovation.
Last week’s Enterprise Connect set the stage for much of this innovation, with many prominent CCaaS providers making exciting announcements and attempting to differentiate their offerings.
Here is a quick overview of the most notable announcements.
AWS Streamlines Its Agent Interface
From an initial set of contact center building blocks to a fully-fledged platform, AWS has evolved its Amazon Connect CCaaS solution into a marketing-leading platform.
Last month’s Gartner Peer Insights and Forrester Wave CCaaS studies underline this status.
Yet, the rapid addition of new features had left its agent UI crowded, which often meant that reps navigated many pages and tabs to resolve customer queries.
Thankfully, AWS announced the release of Step-by-Step Guides for Amazon Connect, which lead agents across the optimal resolution path as they handle customer queries.
The vendor also launched a partnership with Zoom, which will see the UC provider join its marketplace, giving customers that want to converge UCaaS and CCaaS another option.
Zoom Teams Up With Calabrio on Workforce Management
Alongside its AWS partnership, Zoom announced that it had joined forces with Calabrio to make workforce management (WFM) solutions available within the Zoom Contact Center.
Calabrio has become a prominent player in the WFM arena since it acquired Teleopti in 2019.
With the integration, Zoom users can leverage AI-driven forecasting, automated scheduling, mobile app self-scheduling, and much more.
It also provides an alternative option to Verint WFM, another integration that Zoom announced in November 2022 – alongside several others.
NICE Embraces the GPT-Era with Enlighten Actions
In January, NICE became one of the first CCaaS vendors to integrate ChatGPT into its CCaaS platform, supporting conversational commerce experiences.
Now the vendor has launched NICE Enlighten Actions, the next evolution of Enlighten, its collection of AI models embedded across its CXone solution. These aim to empower contact center leaders with intelligence.
Actions will add a generative AI layer over-the-top to turn that intelligence into action.
Early examples include auto-summarizing customer contacts, generating knowledge articles, and showcasing automation opportunities.
Five9 Follows Suit with Agent Assist 2.0
As CX Today teased in February, Five9 has now formally released its first GPT-driven contact center solution, which will bolster its agent-assist offering.
Indeed, the vendor announced the solution as “Agent Assist 2.0 with AI Summary”.
The AI Summary tool harnesses the power of large language models (LLMs) to auto-summarize customer conversation transcripts and publish them in the CRM.
It complements Five9’s other agent-assist tools, which sit on the agent desktop and support agents to work faster and smoother.
Expect the formal announcement of another solution: GPT-fuelled AI Insights. Also, teased in February, this will group contacts by traits such as intent to help contact centers spot automation and process automation opportunities.
Cresta Jumps On the Generative AI Bandwagon
While it may not provide an all-encompassing CCaaS platform, Cresta integrates with many, adding value with cutting-edge AI.
As such, it is unsurprising to see the vendor grab the generative AI bull by the horns, releasing several enhancements to its portfolio.
These include instant modeling, flow modeling, topic discovery, and automated labeling.
In addition to these announcements, the provider also launched a Cresta Revenue Growth platform, which listens to sales conversations and churns out insights.
Google Leverages Its Conversational AI Prowess
Google has revealed plans to embed its generative AI App Builder into its CCaaS platform.
The app builder brings together its LLMs, conversational AI, and search tooling to help businesses build multimodal bots faster.
Indeed, creators can now do so with natural language alone. They explain what information the bot should collect, which tasks it should perform, and which APIs it should send data to.
From there, the tool auto-generates a bot they can review, tweak, and deploy.
Having recently achieved leadership status in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Conversational AI, such innovation will further bolster its standing.
Verint Integrates with Google’s CCaaS Platform
Verint has tied its Customer Engagement Platform with the Google Contact Center AI Platform.
The move aims to make Verint’s “CX automation” solutions available to Google’s CCaaS customers. These include its WFO offerings that deliver automated forecasting, scheduling, and QA. Yet, its routing, orchestration, and compliance are also part of the deal.
Finally, Verint Workforce Engagement and CX solutions will become available on the Google Cloud Marketplace to simplify the procurement process.
UJET Moves Into the Workforce Management Space
UJET has added native WFM tools to its CCaaS platform, including forecasting, scheduling, and intraday management tools.
Interestingly, these will also become available on Google’s Contact Center AI Platform, with UJET a close partner of the tech giant.
As such, Google CCaaS customers may choose between UJET’s offering – which includes all the WFM essentials – or Verint’s best-of-breed solution.
Twilio Introduces Segment Unify
Over the past couple of years, much of Twilio’s innovation efforts have centered on Segment, the customer data platform it acquired in 2020.
Now, the vendor is beginning to merge some of its capabilities with Twilio Flex, its CCaaS solution.
The launch of Segment Unify last week is likely the first step, which captures real-time interaction data and builds it into a unified customer profile.
With this data, Unify attempts to get a better grasp of customer behavior, also tracking movements across the web, mobile, service, and various other applications.
Cisco Launches Its Self-Learning Contact Center
Alongside releasing new audio and video intelligence tools across its Webex portfolio, Cisco outlined its vision for “the self-learning contact center.”
Such a contact center includes various AI models that sift through data, learn, and grow increasingly intelligent, recommending actions to improve the service experience.
To reflect this new vision, Cisco released two such AI models: Topic Analysis and Agent Answers.
Topic Analysis captures trends from customer transcripts, unpacks trends, and presents them as visuals to service leaders.
Meanwhile, Agent Answers listens in on customer conversations and spotlights relevant real-time information from contact center systems for agents to harness.
Avaya Teams Up With Cognigy
Avaya has now integrated Cognigy AI into its Experience Platform.
Hardy Myers, SVP of Business Development and Strategy at Cognigy, stated that the deal “marks a new era of AI-powered customer service.”
While this is a little strong, the move is significant given Avaya’s impressive install base and Cognigy’s standing as a market leader in conversational AI – as per the recent Gartner Magic Quadrant.
Moreover, Avaya’s CCaaS competitor NICE has reaped the rewards of a similar partnership with Amelia, a prominent rival of Cognigy.
With that said, the partnership is one of many for Cognigy, as it maintains close ties to AWS and Genesys.
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