Market Description
The contact center is an exceptional example of the subtle but critical difference between a bulwark and a vanguard. A bulwark is the defensive core—a protective barrier that acts as a shield—asked to bear the brunt of an attack. A vanguard, on the other hand, is the forward team, the tip of the spear of an advancing front line. While a bulwark holds ground, a vanguard advances an attack.
The contact center is expected to be both: holding firm to protect brand ground by responding to customer issues, complaints, and problems while also proactively initiating engagements to shore up forward motion on everything from loyalty to satisfaction and revenue. What this multipronged expectation has created is nothing short of chaos contained in a pressure cooker.
Contact center solutions have largely focused on taming this functional challenge by enabling organizations to route, address, and resolve inbound customer interactions and engagements. Contact center as a service (CCaaS) shifted this critical front line of customer experience (CX) to the cloud with the promise of a scalable infrastructure and a flexible toolset to modernize the contact center.
The contact center has also long been a proving ground (and an experimentation lab) for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, undergoing another massive capability shift thanks to the introduction of generative AI (GenAI). New generative and agentic tools are bolstering experiences for agents, supervisors, and customers with superior, intuitive, and easy-to-use interactive and intelligent tools such as real-time self-service agents for customers and employees alike, robust recommendation engines, content generation and data analysis, smart routing, intelligent workforce planning, agent assist, sentiment analysis, chatbots, data management, and conversational intelligence.
