Consider the CCaaS platforms of the past, each built on a core telephony infrastructure.
These solutions somewhat mimicked on-premise offerings, snowballing into massive monolithic software stacks that lacked agility.
Thankfully, these have mostly given way to the cloud contact centers of today.
This latest generation of CCaaS platforms accelerates innovation. How? With a cloud-native foundation, which allows vendors to drop new applications on-the-fly.
However, despite this change, many vendors still put voice and routing first; everything else plays second fiddle.
Of course, these remain essential elements of almost any service operation. Yet, the space has witnessed a shift in how buyers prioritize their contact center stack.
That shift signals the next evolution of CCaaS and paves the way for the cloud contact center platforms of tomorrow.
The Cloud Contact Center of Tomorrow
As contact centers de-emphasize their core routing system, they become more open to new opportunities and advanced cloud communications offerings.
Keith Dawson, VP & Research Director at Ventana Research, made this point in a recent blog post.
“An organization is freer to weigh the merits of different business application platforms as the first priority,” he states.
“That means that CX vendors with a strong platform based on AI, machine learning, and workflow automation can help buyers think about building better processes.”
The next generation of vendors is leading that conversation, using AI to reimagine contact center journeys, from the first words of an IVR to post-contact feedback collection.
AI everywhere; that is the future.
Unfortunately, current CCaaS platforms fall short of those ambitions.
The latest Gartner Magic Quadrant report reflects this. It states:
“The market has seen a notable increase in demand for systems that can support greater levels of sophistication in support of digital channels, self-service, interaction and journey analytics – and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to provide enhanced levels of automation.
“However, CCaaS vendors’ support for these capabilities often lacks the functional maturity to meet customers’ demands.”
Thankfully, the new-wave CCaaS vendors are starting to change the narrative.
With native AI the beating heart of their platforms, these vendors are moving the needle for what’s possible and inching the market closer to the cloud contact center of tomorrow.
The next step? Enabling the data flows to make these AI models hum.
Moving the CCaaS Needle with Data & AI
Think beyond contact center tech for a moment. Consider other software stacks, like Martech. That industry is building platforms that pave the way for a centralized data lake, which advanced analytics engines may feed from.
Creating such a data hub is critical to ensure the effectiveness of AI. After all, even with the most imaginative AI models, the garbage in = garbage out rule applies.
Yet, communications vendors have often struggled to leverage the ideal data inputs.
