The contact center market is evolving to address changes in customer expectations and enterprise requirements by leveraging emerging artificial intelligence, Aragon Research concluded in its "2019 Globe for Intelligent Contact Centers" report released today.
In the report, Aragon identifies three key reasons for the emergence of the AI-based contact center:
- Customer expectations are emerging faster than enterprises can respond;
- Customers expect personalized and consistent experiences; and
- Natural language processing (NLP) enables understanding sentiment and predicting the reasons for customer engagement.
The evolution of machine learning technologies and digital assistants are helping to drive the growth of this market, the report states, because companies will be able to identify the real issues customers face 50 percent faster than traditional approaches by 2022.
The report also contends that though contact centers today are staffed by humans, by the end of 2021 digital labor will become a key feature in intelligent contact center offerings. Companies will need to balance the ratio of human to digital labor, it states.
"When every second counts, using AI in the contact center is a way to automate and resolve customer issues faster, and that's why it has transformative potential when it comes to the customer experience," said Jim Lundy, CEO of Aragon Research. "Making the right contact center choice is critical, and enterprises need to keep current and future AI capabilities in mind when considering providers."
The providers evaluated in this report were Altitude Software, Aspect, Avaya, Cisco, Five9, Genesys, Mitel, NEC, NICE inContact, Talkdesk, Unify, Vonage, and 8x8.