The contact center technology market is crowded, and providers are pushing the innovation envelope to stand out.
By investing in flashy conferences and elaborate marketing campaigns, each vendor wants contact center leaders to know that their latest innovation is the best.
Yet, some catch the eye more than others in terms of how they encapsulate each vendor's vision for the customer experiences of tomorrow and/or address common contact center pain points.
Here are ten excellent examples, all released since the start of 2024.
1. The GenAI Studio by Five9
In 2023, contact center vendors rushed out of the gate to release various generative AI (GenAI)-based applications tied to a particular large language model (LLM).
Since then, those vendors have rearchitected their solutions so that contact centers can plug in different LLMs to power GenAI use cases and optimize their outcomes.
However, Five9 took this even further with its GenAI Studio.
The offering also allows service teams to reconfigure the default prompt that comes with various GenAI use cases. They can then test multiple prompts, customize, and enhance the outputs.
Of course, the pre-configured prompt may generate good results for simple use cases, like summarizations. But, in the long run, when use cases become more complex and ask more of the LLM, the GenAI Studio offers significant potential to maximize ROI.
2. The Verint TimeFlex Bot
In March, Verint released a TimeFlex Bot that automatically calculates the impact of an agent shift change across 15-minute intervals.
By doing so, the bot gives each interval a "FlexCoin" value. That is either positive or negative, depending on whether that impact is beneficial or detrimental to core workforce management (WFM) metrics.
With this bot in action, contact center agents can make self-service changes to their schedule – gaining or losing "FlexCoins" in the process.
All agents need to do is stick to the following two rules:
- Don’t modify their number of paid hours.
- Preserve a positive FlexCoin balance.
As a result, resource planners increase their schedule efficiency while agents gain greater schedule autonomy. A win-win that – according to Verint – will "revolutionize" contact center scheduling.
3. Proficiency-Based Routing by Amazon Connect
Many CCaaS providers are developing workforce engagement management (WEM) solutions. But, beyond building unified reports, few vendors are thinking of how to best marry the technologies.
AWS is an exception. Via the Proficiency-Based Routing feature in Amazon Connect, its CCaaS customers can create a set of "proficiencies", which includes the specific contact reasons each agent excels in handling.
Contact centers may pull agent performance data from Amazon Connect Contact Lens to uncover those contact reasons and route contacts accordingly.
As a result, agents receive the cases best-suited to their skill set, customers engage with experts on their specific issue, and contact centers raise their first contact resolution (FCR) rates.
4. The Unified Experience from Genesys and ServiceNow
CCaaS stalwart Genesys and CRM juggernaut ServiceNow announced a combined platform in May.
The Unified Experience from Genesys and ServiceNow offering brings Genesys voice, journey orchestration, and WEM tech to the ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) environment.
As such, the platform somewhat mirrors the CX Cloud from Genesys and Salesforce, which launched last year and signals at a shift in traditional CX tech thinking.
Instead of building "tight integrations", Genesys is creating co-innovation teams with CRM leaders to act as a single entity.
By doing so, Genesys is getting ahead of the CCaaS-CRM convergence trend and influencing its direction while building out a bigger ecosystem its customers.
5. The Here Enterprise Browser
With its new Enterprise Browser, Here, formerly OpenFin, aims to reimagine the agent desktop experience.
The Browser does so by allowing contact centers to create a custom desktop layout for specific contact reasons.
Then, when an agent receives a specific contact, the desktop defaults to its related layout, which agents can easily flick through as they complete the resolution journey.
Google Chrome released a similar innovation in 2022. Yet, Here offers a couple of differentiated features, including "Supertabs" and "Signals" – as outlined in the following interview with Mazy Dar, CEO of Here.
Finally, the solution stands out for its acknowledgment that it’s often impossible to build a "single pane of glass view" of the customer. For many, this is likely the next-best alternative.