CCaaS Platforms: Must-Have Features, Trends, & Providers

CCaaS portfolios are expanding quickly, with providers rushing to offer new workforce engagement management (WEM), journey orchestration, and generative AI (GenAI) solutions.

Meanwhile, many are facilitating new data management strategies, creating playbooks for migrations, and working more closely with vendors of adjacent technologies, like CRM.

CX Today has covered all this extensively. However, some market shifts may have gone undetected.

Recognizing this, we reached out to the following six contact center experts to gather their thoughts on the evolution of CCaaS platforms.

• Rajesh Chandran, VP of Product Management at Tata Communications
• Lisa Orford, VP for Contact Center at 8x8
• Sean Taylor, Global CEO of Content Guru
• Richard Bassett, VP of Digital, AI, & Analytics at NICE
• Crystal Miceli, VP of Product & Industry Marketing at Talkdesk
• Vinod Muthukrishnan, VP & COO at Webex Customer Experience, Cisco

Below, they share the latest CCaaS innovations, industry trends, and providers to watch.

CCaaS Platforms: The Must-Have Features

Here, the six experts share the next-gen CCaaS innovations they believe are "must-haves", looking beyond the conventional, cornerstone capabilities like telephony, routing, and agent desktops.

GenAI-Powered Interaction Routing

Miceli: One new advancement taking the contact center industry by storm is GenAI-powered interaction routing.

The feature eliminates the need for IVR systems that are a snarl to maintain and are a pain for customers to endure.

Instead, it replaces them with natural language interactions and automated workflows that intelligently route inbound traffic to the right automated solution or live agent.

The technology fosters natural conversations, allowing customers to express themselves freely while the system comprehends and responds effectively.

Talkdesk has witnessed GenAI-powered interaction routing slash abandonment rates, decrease hold time, and improve first call resolution (FCR).

Yet, the most sophisticated of these go a step further and offer GenAI as the method to configure the entire interaction, which also reduces operational costs.

An Overlaying Customer Data Platform

Taylor: While every business that uses CCaaS understands omnichannel communication, Content Guru believes the real differentiator is omni-data.

Beyond managing conversations across channels, CCaaS platforms must unify data from a growing number of systems of record - on average, 13.7 different places of record.

Moreover, according to Deloitte, 92 percent of organizations do not have a single view of the customer that combines all channels and data for contact center agents.

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) makes that easy, tracking the customer throughout their interactions and creating an 'omni-data' record.

No matter how the customer chooses to reach out, Omni–data from across every contact channel funnels into the CDP.

From breaking down data siloes and supporting agents during interactions to creating new efficiencies for the business, the CDP will power next-generation customer experiences.

Purpose-Built AI

Bassett: Many companies rely on generic AI in their CCaaS offerings, which often lack the industry-specific data, insights, and guardrails needed to deliver accurate, relevant, and appropriate results. This is where purpose-built AI becomes the ultimate advantage.

Purpose-built AI for CX is trained using industry-specific data, including historical customer interactions, and built with the guardrails required to deliver responses personalized to the brand.

A unified CCaaS platform leveraging purpose-built AI enables businesses to design, build, and automate every workflow and - ultimately - fully automate customer service.

For companies aiming to lead in customer experience, investing in a unified next-gen CCaaS platform with purpose-built AI is the key to unlocking the future of CX.

A Framework for Enabling Seamless Experiences

Chandran: In today's fast-paced business environment, customers expect effortless and cohesive interactions across various touchpoints.

Consider recent research conducted by Tata Communications in collaboration with Harvard Business Review Analytics Services. It found that nearly 55 percent of respondents recognized the need to make interactions more seamless. They believe this is a top priority when evaluating contact center solutions.

Yet, enabling seamless interactions encompasses several critical aspects:

• Enabling seamless customer interactions at various touchpoints, ensuring a unified experience regardless of the channel.
• Enabling seamless interactions with agents, allowing support staff to access customer histories and data in real time.
• Enabling seamless interactions globally, guaranteeing consistent customer support and experiences, regardless of location.
• Enabling a seamless technology stack that integrates voice, video, data, and analytics, allowing organizations to provide frictionless journeys throughout the customer lifecycle.

Through its Digital Fabric, Tata Communications helps its clients integrate and simplify their IT foundation. This innovative framework seamlessly connects various communication channels, paving the way for a truly unified customer experience.

A Digital Front Door

Muthukrishnan: One capability fast becoming essential for a CCaaS platform is offering a digital front door to the business.

That door features an always-on, highly intelligent, bi-directional virtual agent supporting text and voice interactions.

The multimodal virtual agent serves as the initial point of contact, providing seamless and efficient customer service around the clock.

Such features are becoming indispensable for any contact center striving to enhance customer engagement and satisfaction.

Employee Experience Enablers

Orford: While some may call out a single tool or solution, the new must-have isn’t a piece of tech; it’s customer experience.

That’s why there’s so much interest in technologies like those that enable a single pane of glass customer view, because a better employee experience should always lead to a better customer service experience.

Traditionally, contact centers have handled interactions as a one-off scenario - a chat coming in, a call that needs to be answered, a support issue - but now old-school thinking.

Now, contact centers will consider: is the text from a customer ten minutes ago related to the call they’ve just made?

In doing so, they measure the customer, not the number of times they got in touch.

The challenge is that good customer experience is not about a single tool; it's about the overall holistic approach in a business, from bringing together the back office and front office to breaking down silo mentalities.

CCaaS Platforms: The Trends

Expecting to see GenAI pop-up across the board? Fear not! The six CCaaS specialists share other trends ripping through the market.

Agentic AI Comes to the Fore

Miceli: Agentic AI agents go beyond reacting to prompts as GenAI does to autonomously anticipate and address real-time operational and customer needs.

Without a human in the loop, agentic AI agents can think and execute independently, interacting directly or in a "headless" motion.

Such autonomy eliminates the need for complex and lengthy pre-configured instructions - and can also enable skills for live agents to be exponentially increased - as multiple AI Agents can work simultaneously and autonomously on behalf of a live Agent in the background.

Imagine a single agent that can answer billing questions, address fraud concerns, make appointments, conduct sales, check order statuses... the possibilities are limitless.

As with any new technology, especially one with autonomous capabilities, oversight and responsible management with AI guardrails are necessary to ensure safe, accurate, and ethical interactions.

Yet, the combination of advanced functionality and robust safeguards makes agentic AI agents a pivotal innovation primed to take over the CCaaS space.

IoT Enables Pre-Emptive Customer Service

Taylor: One trend transforming the CCaaS space is the rise of Internet of Things (IoT)-driven customer service experiences.

Gartner has predicted that by 2026, one in five customer conversations that come through the contact center will be from IoT-connected devices, also known as digital customers.

With Cisco predicting nearly half a trillion IoT devices, these connected devices are changing how customers interact with businesses.

Traditionally, customers would call in to report issues like a power outage. Today, IoT devices, such as smart meters, pre-emptively notify the service provider before the customer notices the problem.

As more digital customers emerge, CCaaS platforms must evolve to manage IoT-driven interactions differently from traditional human-initiated contacts.

While customers still value human connection, IoT introduces automated, real-time data that seamlessly integrates into support workflows.

Proactively responding to IoT alerts before customers reach out enables businesses to anticipate and resolve real-time issues, enhancing overall customer satisfaction.

AI Changes Conventional CX Roles

Bassett: As AI adoption grows throughout the CCaaS space and customer service becomes more automated, CX roles will transform significantly beyond traditional contact centers.

The focus of human involvement will shift towards overseeing AI performance, ensuring seamless AI-human collaboration, and fostering deeper customer relationships.

As such, CX professionals will take on strategic roles, managing AI oversight to maintain service quality and accuracy while dedicating more time to customer relationship management and complex issue resolution.

This transformation will elevate the importance of customer experience roles, making them integral to sustaining brand loyalty and driving business growth.

Therefore, as the roles in customer service evolve, expect investment to move from human-led CX interactions to reskilling the workforce with the rise of prompt engineers and strategy planners. This upleveling of human skill sets may even impact school curriculums and business learning programs.

Real-Time Translation Becomes More Widely-Implemented

Orford: Real-time across multiple languages is not often discussed, but it's here and impressing everyone when it's in action.

On multiple levels, it brings improvements. It's making services more accessible for everyone - and that's critical in sectors like local government. After all, some councils and regional authorities in the UK have more than 150 languages to deal with.