Every information technology leader I talk to has an artificial intelligence story about customer experience. Almost none has an outcome story. That gap is now measurable. Talkdesk Inc., in partnership with NewtonX, surveyed 252 director-level-and-above leaders in customer experience, IT, operations and AI strategy at midmarket and enterprise organizations across four regions.
Every vendor event has a center of gravity, and at theCUBE Research’s AI ROI in Contact Center Summit, it wasn’t a product. It was a metric this industry is finally ready to abandon. I co-hosted the summit recently with Bob Laliberte (pictured, left), principal analyst at theCUBE Research, and spoke with executives from Cisco Systems Inc., Five9 Inc., Zoom Communications Inc., Talkdesk Inc., and Converged Technology Professionals, an implementation partner.
Enterprise software architecture has long suffered from what can be called an “integration tax.” When an organization deploys a communications platform, it rarely stops at the basic functions, such as calling and messaging. To extract operational value, it must overlay data analytics layers, emergency notification systems and context-matching engines. Each addition introduces architectural complexity, data egress liabilities and synchronization latency. This week communications provider 8×8 expanded its AI tool suite.
Sovereign cloud discussions have been a core part of artificial intelligence and infrastructure conversations for the past few years and are now critical to communications. Historically, the communications sector has been a late adopter of technology trends due to the mission-critical nature of its operations. However, given that customer service is one of the “low-hanging fruit” use cases for AI, the sovereign cloud conversation has come to communications.
Customer experience used to be something tuned at the edges. Better call center scripts, nicer portals, lower prices or a new survey could make incremental improvements in consumers’ perceptions of a brand. Today, it starts much earlier because every interaction across the channels customers use every day matters. Text, voice and messaging are no longer just “pipes” for getting a message from point A to point B. They’re now the primary mechanism through which trust is built or eroded in seconds.