The contact center technology market is crowded, and providers are pushing the innovation envelope to stand out.
By investing in flashy conferences and elaborate marketing campaigns, each vendor wants contact center leaders to know that their latest innovation is the best.
Yet, some catch the eye more than others in terms of how they encapsulate each vendor’s vision for the customer experiences of tomorrow and/or address common contact center pain points.
Here are ten excellent examples, all released since the start of 2024.
1. The GenAI Studio by Five9
In 2023, contact center vendors rushed out of the gate to release various generative AI (GenAI)-based applications tied to a particular large language model (LLM).
Since then, those vendors have rearchitected their solutions so that contact centers can plug in different LLMs to power GenAI use cases and optimize their outcomes.
However, Five9 took this even further with its GenAI Studio.
The offering also allows service teams to reconfigure the default prompt that comes with various GenAI use cases. They can then test multiple prompts, customize, and enhance the outputs.
Of course, the pre-configured prompt may generate good results for simple use cases, like summarizations. But, in the long run, when use cases become more complex and ask more of the LLM, the GenAI Studio offers significant potential to maximize ROI.
2. The Verint TimeFlex Bot
In March, Verint released a TimeFlex Bot that automatically calculates the impact of an agent shift change across 15-minute intervals.
By doing so, the bot gives each interval a “FlexCoin” value. That is either positive or negative, depending on whether that impact is beneficial or detrimental to core workforce management (WFM) metrics.
With this bot in action, contact center agents can make self-service changes to their schedule – gaining or losing “FlexCoins” in the process.
All agents need to do is stick to the following two rules:
- Don’t modify their number of paid hours.
- Preserve a positive FlexCoin balance.
As a result, resource planners increase their schedule efficiency while agents gain greater schedule autonomy. A win-win that – according to Verint – will “revolutionize” contact center scheduling.
3. Proficiency-Based Routing by Amazon Connect
Many CCaaS providers are developing workforce engagement management (WEM) solutions. But, beyond building unified reports, few vendors are thinking of how to best marry the technologies.
AWS is an exception. Via the Proficiency-Based Routing feature in Amazon Connect, its CCaaS customers can create a set of “proficiencies”, which includes the specific contact reasons each agent excels in handling.
Contact centers may pull agent performance data from Amazon Connect Contact Lens to uncover those contact reasons and route contacts accordingly.
As a result, agents receive the cases best-suited to their skill set, customers engage with experts on their specific issue, and contact centers raise their first contact resolution (FCR) rates.
4. The Unified Experience from Genesys and ServiceNow
CCaaS stalwart Genesys and CRM juggernaut ServiceNow announced a combined platform in May.
The Unified Experience from Genesys and ServiceNow offering brings Genesys voice, journey orchestration, and WEM tech to the ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) environment.
As such, the platform somewhat mirrors the CX Cloud from Genesys and Salesforce, which launched last year and signals at a shift in traditional CX tech thinking.
Instead of building “tight integrations”, Genesys is creating co-innovation teams with CRM leaders to act as a single entity.
By doing so, Genesys is getting ahead of the CCaaS-CRM convergence trend and influencing its direction while building out a bigger ecosystem its customers.
5. The Here Enterprise Browser
With its new Enterprise Browser, Here, formerly OpenFin, aims to reimagine the agent desktop experience.
The Browser does so by allowing contact centers to create a custom desktop layout for specific contact reasons.
Then, when an agent receives a specific contact, the desktop defaults to its related layout, which agents can easily flick through as they complete the resolution journey.
Google Chrome released a similar innovation in 2022. Yet, Here offers a couple of differentiated features, including “Supertabs” and “Signals” – as outlined in the following interview with Mazy Dar, CEO of Here.
Finally, the solution stands out for its acknowledgment that it’s often impossible to build a “single pane of glass view” of the customer. For many, this is likely the next-best alternative.
6. Multi-Region CCaaS Support by Google
Perceived resiliency issues – such as outages or downtime – are a significant reason many enterprises still rely on legacy contact center infrastructure.
Yet, Google has gone further to allay such fears by launching a multi-region capability that allows its CCaaS platform to run “automatically and reliably” across global clouds and regions.
That feature enables cross-region failover, ensures business continuity, and provides that all-important uptime.
As such, Google claims that the users of its Contact Center AI Platform (CCAI-P) can rest assured that “cloud outages [will] never impact critical customer experiences.”
7. The Expected Net Promoter Score (xNPS) by evaluagent
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is not what it once was. For starters, few customers respond to the surveys that contact centers send to generate the score.
Moreover, too many contact centers have tried to gamify the metric by modifying the NPS question or by only asking it to a select group of customers.
At this point, it’s tricky to almost ever trust the NPS score within a business report.
To tackle such issues and create a more trustworthy metric, contact center QA provider evaluagent has added an Expected Net Promoter Score (xNPS) feature into its platform.
With accurate correlations to reliable NPS results, the feature generates a score across 100 percent of contact center conversations.
As a result, contact center teams gain a more representative view of customer experience beyond the individual performance of agents.
8. NICE Enlighten XM (Experience Memory)
NICE Enlighten XM unifies customer interaction data, metadata, and insight from the business’s broader CX ecosystem to build a unique memory graph for each customer.
Contact centers can then lay the memory graph over their chosen large language model (LLM) to personalize and optimize GenAI use cases.
In March, NICE added this solution to its Enlighten suite, augmenting the vendor’s Enlighten Actions, Autopilot, and Copilot offerings.
9. The Collaborative Customer Experience Platform by Zingly.ai
Every CCaaS provider talks about delivering value across the customer journey. But how many operate across the entire customer journey?
Beyond the contact center, there are sales, marketing, commerce, and many other types of providers claiming to do precisely the same.
Yet, silos still stilt the customer experience, with different departments dependent on their unique software stacks and data pools.
Zingly.ai aims to challenge that. As Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research, recently told CX Today:
It has created a software overlay that aggregates all that customer data, puts it into what’s called a “room”, and applies AI to be much more predictive.
That’s particularly innovative because if the contact center, marketing, and sales apply AI to their own customer data sets, they may generate conflicting insights that create confusion throughout the customer experience.
If that problem does indeed become more pervasive, Zingly.ai is well set with its Collaborative Customer Experience Platform.
10. Digital Twins by Sprinklr
The Sprinklr Digital Twin is a conversational AI offering that allows different departments within a business to build their own AI Twin.
In the contact center, such an AI Twin may autonomously answer customer contacts. Yet, it can also double as a Copilot, automating tasks for agents, supervisors, and managers.
While other conversational AI vendors may offer similar functionality, Sprinklr’s offering stands out for two significant reasons:
- The Twins can collaborate. So, if a customer’s intent changes midway through a conversation – say from a service– to a commerce-related query – they may automatically route to the other Twin for a more seamless experience.
- Each Twin doesn’t stay within the confines of an application. It can perform tasks across channels and platforms – from CCaaS to UCaaS and beyond.
Lastly, Sprinklr allows organizations to develop a persona for their bot, which flexes across use cases for a tailored customer experience.
Eager to dive deeper into some of these vendors? If so, check out our Contact Center Marketplace.
