aheadCRM

We have been lying to ourselves since, well, basically since forever. We placed customer support agents into a padded room called the "contact center," handed them a ticketing system, and told them to keep the angry people away from the rest of the business. We tracked average handle times; we cheered when a routing algorithm saved a fraction of a second; and we pretended that managing an interaction was the same thing as solving a problem. Deflecting an issue was the holy grail. That era is over. The walls of the contact center have been blown wide open, and the debris is currently raining down on the CRM and operations landscapes. The market is shifting from asking the question "who can capture the ticket best?" to "who can actually resolve the problem fastest?” Which is an entirely different category of question. And far more meaningful. And as Cameron Marsh from Nucleus Research so accurately pointed out in our recent CRMKonvo, that is a much nastier, ...

The past weeks showed quite some interesting activity on the mergers and acquisitions and the partnership frontiers. NiCE acquired the German conversational AI rock star Cognigy for $955M and a short time later announced that the company enhanced its partnership with Salesforce . At nearly the same time, Genesys received an additional funding of $1.5 bn from Salesforce and ServiceNow. Salesforce acquired Waii and Bluebird . VC company Thoma Bravo acquired the still leading CCaaS vendor Verint , to name but a few of the more interesting, and perhaps consequential ones. On top of all this, Avaya seems to have offered all employees a voluntary exit package . What all this shows is that there is significant consolidation going on in the AI-assisted (or should I say, driven?) CCaaS market and that various players are battling to provide – or at least be perceived to provide – the most comprehensive and valuable platform while others fight for survival.  Yes, it’s nothing new, but c...