CCaaS is a crowded market, with vendors announcing massive release waves, moving into adjacent markets, and rolling up competitors to differentiate and grow. That’s before we consider the evolution of these platforms with self-service and AI.
Each of these trends has expanded the definition of a CCaaS platform. Instead of offering core communication channels, routing, and a dialer, they’re now often expected to cover workforce engagement management (WEM), conversational analytics, knowledge management, and more.
As that trend continues and additional AI use cases bubble to the surface, it’s fascinating to consider what the CCaaS platforms of tomorrow will look like.
Throughout the year, prominent industry analysts and thinkers have shared their thoughts in conversation with CX Today. Here are five of our favorite takes.
→ UPCOMING WEBINAR: The Contact Center Evolution: The Missing Pieces to Make AI a Success
- CCaaS Platforms Will Evolve In the Face of New Competition
Pureplay CCaaS providers face increasing competition from CRM and Customer Engagement Center (CEC) vendors, which can provide a deep and rich experience across all kinds of use cases.
Any CCaaS vendor following them in a demo should expect the customer to often ask: “Where’s the rest of it?” because what they just saw was likely so much broader.
Salesforce is a great model, with Service, Sales, Marketing Cloud, which you can start using immediately via a browser.
If it’s not quite right, you can grab an app from the marketplace and customize it. If that’s still not enough, you can go on force.com and build what you envision.
This model, in my mind, should be pervasive across the entirety of the CX application ecosystem. It encourages co-innovation and partnership, making buyers feel secure.
If CCaaS vendors don’t adapt to this approach, they risk becoming marginalized as voice plug-in providers to CRM or CEC systems.
- Simon Harrison, Founder & CEO of Actionary
- CCaaS Platforms Will Converge with the Broader CX Tech Stack
We will see more co-innovation and partnerships between CCaaS and broader CX vendors that recognize the necessity of integrating their offerings to provide comprehensive solutions.
It’s concerning, however, when CCaaS vendors claim they can replace other CX solutions outside of customer support, particularly those aiming to become marketing automation tools or handle multi-channel communications entirely. It’s unrealistic to think a CMO will suddenly adopt a contact center solution as a comprehensive marketing tool.
Similarly, CRM vendors shouldn’t attempt to handle global voice networks, which would significantly impact their licensing margins. The broader lesson here is the importance of realistic, strategic partnerships that complement rather than compete.
The key question is which partnerships will prove most powerful: those with CRMs or workflow engines like ServiceNow?
The future will reveal which strategy – focusing on customer journey workflows or transactional records – will lead to deeper CCaaS integration into the overall tech stack and business processes.
- Liz Miller, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research
- CCaaS Platforms Will Come with More Prescriptive Telemetry and Handholding
Ecosystems will become crucial. But, CCaaS can’t just be about delivering new software capabilities, especially for contact center managers who aren’t accustomed to constant updates.
Instead, CCaaS needs to be instrumented so that managers can understand the benefits they’re getting from the software and identify areas for more value. Telemetry is crucial here, and so is handholding.
In the contact center, it’s not enough to simply build and deploy new features. Managers need to be guided on how to leverage these features, helping them understand and activate the value.
Also, it’s essential to support agents in using the software effectively, ultimately improving their interactions with customers.
This process involves more than just pushing out new capabilities every quarter; it requires ongoing support and engagement.
- Rebecca Wetteman, CEO & Principal Analyst at Valoir
- CCaaS Platforms Will Embed More AI Use Cases to Improve Customer Data Sets
CCaaS vendors aim to combine communications information with other data and AI to make smarter decisions. However, I see a problem: many businesses may not have the data quality to generate accurate, actionable AI-driven insights.
For example, CCaaS providers are making all these big Salesforce announcements to bring this big corpus of CX data together. These are great in theory, but how many companies truly love their Salesforce data? From my experience, salespeople often input minimal data.
Where AI could make a significant impact is as an input mechanism. Already, we see AI listening to calls, summarizing them, and updating CRM records.
In the future, CCaaS platforms will offer more of these use cases to enhance data quality for sales, customer success, and contact centers.
Essentially, good AI can lead to even better AI down the road.
Currently, though, many businesses lack the data discipline to leverage this potential fully. But, in time, that will hopefully change.
- Zeus Kerravala, Founder & Principal Analyst at ZK Research
- The Third Wave of Contact Center Platforms Will Take Over
On-premise contact centers are the first wave. These disconnected solutions require cumbersome integrations to work together. They are also fragile, innovation-averse, and expensive to maintain.
Nevertheless, many large enterprises still cling to their legacy systems.
Why? There are several reasons, including tricky migration loads, regulatory quagmires, and data security concerns.
Each of these issues is surmountable. However, the second wave of contact center platforms did little to inspire enterprises to take them on.
After all, these first-gen CCaaS solutions offered little more than monolithic stacks of software and did little to change the architecture of the contact center.
Thankfully, the third wave is here. These cloud-native platforms – like the Zoom Contact Center – include low-/no-code interfaces that allow businesses to compose new and improved contact center experiences for customers and agents.
Moreover, they offer embedded AI to help guide and automate elements of these experiences.
As such, businesses may now fundamentally rethink how they solve customer queries – which will, hopefully, entice more of those wave one contact centers to take the CCaaS leap of faith.
- Michelle Couture, Global Product Marketing Lead for Customer Experience at Zoom
Where Can I Learn More About the Future of Contact Centers?
Contact centers are becoming hubs of CX innovation. While that may be because businesses want to trial AI in a customer support environment before they dare implement it within sales and marketing, it’s an exciting time for service leaders.
With that excitement, however, comes anxiety. How can contact centers onboard new solutions while keeping on top of their existing priorities and day-to-day firefighting?
Thankfully, CX Today is hosting a webinar with Adrian Swinscoe – a prominent CX author, advisor, and speaker – to answer that exact question.
During the webinar, Swinscoe will take us through the current challenges contact centers face, the change they’ll soon have to embrace, and his proposed approach to keeping ahead of the curve.
Would you like to register for the webinar? If so, follow the link: The Contact Center Evolution: The Missing Pieces to Make AI a Success
