Since the beginning of SaaS, buyers have purchased applications that essentially comprise of lots of settings, “switches” that users can turn on and off. They’re not truly customizable, but they do have a small amount of flexibility.
Tools in the customer experience space are no different. Whether a service team lays down an IVR or marketing opens up an engagement channel, they’ve tended to purchase an application with pre-built settings.
A simple SaaS tool may have a dozen settings; a complex solution could have thousands. Yet, this premise of limited flexibility runs true across both.
And, if the IT team ever needs some help implementing such a solution, the vendor sends them a knowledge article highlighting the place to find another setting.
Composable platforms rip up that script. As Pierce Buckley, CEO & Co-Founder at babelforce, says:
Instead of looking for a process on a page, the business starts by defining the process it would love to have. The platform then provides the ability to compose that process from what is essentially Lego or a set of building blocks’ that can be entirely customizable.
As such, the business doesn’t have to follow the workflows that their vendor has imagined. Rather, it can define its own desired workflows and create them.
That brings several benefits, including greater control over user experiences, heightened flexibility, and greater adaptability.
Recognizing these advantages, Gartner has compiled a list of Cool Composable Customer Engagement Platform Providers.
Here are some of the businesses that broke onto that list.
The Cool Vendors for Composable Customer Engagement Platforms
Gartner analysts engage with vendors across the customer experience space, assessing their tech portfolio, growth rate, strategy, vision, and various other business dimensions.
Then, they nominate a small number of companies to become “cool vendors”, including those likely to be category-changing or successful within their industry.
Remarkably, some have suggested that 90 percent of Gartner’s historically named “cool vendors” have achieved success via high market valuations and growth rates.
In the 2023 composable customer engagement platforms report, “cool vendors” include: babelforce, Nylas, LeapXpert, Now4real, and Vyntelligence.
Vendors don’t nominate themselves for recognition in the Cool Vendors; Garter reaches out to them, independently deciding who would become a “cool vendor”.
As such, each vendor appears well-placed in a world with new customer expectations fueled by the short, sweet, slick journeys consumers have experienced from brands like Amazon and Uber.
With composable platforms, these three cool vendors have paved the way for organizations to keep up with such business juggernauts. To consider how, let’s deep dive on babelforce.
babelforce: A Verified Cool Vendor
To meet the expectations of modern consumers, many brands have sunk significant funds into developer resources and built customer journeys from the ground up.
Yet, such developers are often hard to come by, pushing costs further. Indeed, software developer wages have increased by 46.4 percent over the past decade.
As such, businesses have faced quite the quandary. On the one hand, they must build seamless journeys and assert control over that process. Yet, on the other, they don’t have the people available to exert that control.
babelforce helps by providing a composable, no-code platform that enables customer experience teams to do what a developer does without the developers.
That brings many potential cost, speed, and control benefits. Yet, perhaps the most overwhelming advantage is the future flexibility it offers CX teams.
After all, typical SaaS solutions will bring barriers into the business, which it can’t afford to have once it reaches a more significant size. As Buckley stated:
“Over time, businesses need to shift processes, integrate systems, add new applications – and, in applying new SaaS components, the business limits its future flexibility. Composable platforms change this unfortunate reality.”
That said, a business with ten service agents probably won’t need a composable platform like babelforce. But, as the contact center expands and adds layers of complexity, its value proposition grows evermore alluring.
Living Up to the “Cool” Label
As per the immortal words of Hollywood actress Vanessa Hudgens:
“Being cool is being your own self, not doing something that someone else is telling you to do.”
In all seriousness, this does ring true, and babelforce has done an excellent job of embracing what it does differently from others: running composability from top to bottom.
Indeed, every part of its platform is composable and available to two categories of people:
- Those with no development skills but are process geeks.
- Developers themselves who can do the bridge-building in a complex environment.
“I think we’re the only company that does that throughout the customer service stack,” affirms Buckey. “No matter if the business is using a tiny piece of infrastructure – like a storage component in the cloud – or if it’s building an algorithm.”
“That is atypical. Of the most successful platforms for making phone calls – which can be very powerful – very little of their functionality is accessible to do anything new with it.”
“At babelforce, everything we do is to allow you to build anything you need.”
The Gartner report highlights how babelforce applies this thinking to personalize and contextualize customer engagements, streamline operations, and drive employee experience.
Moreover, the analyst stated: “Tech vendors working in these spaces should watch babelforce closely as a partner prospect.”
After all, everybody wants to be friends with the cool kid in their class – especially those responsible for co-hosting the best parties, as its CX Festival recently exemplified.
Indeed, this and its global team events highlight how babelforce not only takes a different approach to building tech but also in its marketing and community efforts.
To learn more about this cutting-edge tech and burgeoning community, visit: www.babelforce.com
