Max Ball

Generative AI is on the cusp of revolutionizing chatbots for customer self-service. Learn about the role conversational AI vendors can play.

My favorite piece of new research that we uncovered is a use case where brands leverage a shared UC and CC infrastructure to blur the lines between remote offices and a centralized contact center, resulting in better customer experiences and more efficient customer service.

It’s not proven that Winston Churchill said “Never let a crisis go to waste.” But whoever said it, they could have been talking about chatbot deployments. Our world is littered with unloved chatbots, useless offerings that deliver horrible experiences and are used by no one. Typically, this is the result of trying to boil the ocean, overthink things, and attempt to create the perfect chatbot right out of the gate. Brands that build their chatbots in response to a crisis don’t have time to overthink anything — they just do it, and this has led to some very successful deployments.

ChatGPT is hot right now — but you can't trust it with your customers. Learn why ChatGPT isn't going to replace your contact center any time soon.

In the prior Forrester Wave™ evaluation on contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) providers in August of 2020, AI was mentioned offhand a few times. It was not, however, a factor in the Wave scoring at all. A few years changed everything. AI has taken center stage in this year’s Wave, providing new capabilities across many aspects of a CCaaS vendor’s offerings.

When you strip a song down to its base, you end up with a simple acoustic version, free of overproduction or electronic distractions. The most striking example of this for me is Eric Clapton’s version of “Layla” from MTV Unplugged. When you strip a contact center down to its base, you end up with one-on-one […]

Or, “How a natural language image generation AI used as a meme generator by social media may impact your business.” Welcome To The Future — It’s Got AI-Generated Art Let’s play a quick game. Which of the below images were made by an AI system generating images based on word prompts? Let’s pretend you guessed […]

Some years, Enterprise Connect is the place where the world’s biggest vendors make significant announcements in the unified communications or contact center space. 2022 was one of those years, with both Amazon and Google making significant noise in the contact center space. Amazon Let’s talk Amazon first: It announced its new forecasting, capacity planning, and […]

Rapid Uptick In Customer Adoption  With particularly good reasons and with great intentions, contact centers have been one of the last domains within companies to move their core technology to the cloud. As a critical customer-facing function, contact centers have so much at stake that it makes sense for them not to take chances with […]

Retail contact center agents (aka customer service heroes) typically deal with stressed-out shoppers during the holidays and the return period that extends through March. The shipping and supply chain crisis, however, will make the interactions of the past a walk in the park compared to what’s to come this season. As the season progresses, expect […]

Customer service is a key driver of customer experience (CX), but technology silos often stand in the way of effective collaboration across CX and customer-facing teams. The recent announcement by Zendesk that it intends to acquire Momentive, parent of the well-known SurveyMonkey brand, has the potential to help users of both platforms break through this […]

Genesys is the latest vendor to branch out beyond the traditional contact center and customer service space, moving to add value across much more of the customer journey (like marketing and sales) and, in many ways, pushing into territory more traditionally owned by CRM players. Last week, Genesys announced its acquisitions of Pointillist and Exceed.ai and […]

In my past 30 years in the contact center industry at organizations such as 8×8, Genesys, IBM, and RingCentral, I’ve watched the same movie over and over and over again … too many contact centers are laboring under the tyranny of being a cost center with schizophrenic goals of making customers happy while “doing more […]