The customer service application landscape is under siege from all directions. Some categories in this space are mature, and commoditized functions make it hard to distinguish the value of one vendor's solutions from another's. The huge number of best-in-class point solutions confuse the market and erode the wallet share of established players. Small and midsize vendors change their focus, like moving upmarket, downmarket, or into adjacent categories. System integrators offer business services and industry apps that infringe on the remit of packaged applications. And hyperscalers with best-in-class artificial intelligence now offer customer service apps and pose a real threat due to their size, reach, and ability to control AI costs more effectively.
How do you know the technology categories in which to invest to deliver great service and to future proof your operations? Here are some thoughts:
- Workhorse technologies for customer operations continue to deliver value. Contact center-as-a-service, workforce management, and ticketing form the backbone of customer operations. Together, they solve the key challenges for self-service and digital engagement, inquiry routing, agent operations, collaboration, and workforce management. Even though they've been around for decades, vendors continue to invest in them, which makes them relevant today and in the future. Vendors also realize that these technologies must work together to deliver the most value. This has prompted vendors to offer detailed guidance and reference architectures to do just that. Take advantage of their expertise!
- Generative AI increases the value of a broad swath of technologies. Knowledge management, agent augmentation, and automated quality monitoring (AQM)have been in the market and broadly deployed for years. Yet organizations have not been able to reap their value because they're just too hard to use. Knowledge management can power self-service operations, yet creating content is an onerous manual process. Agent augmentation tools have historically been rules-driven and inflexible. AQM has historically struggled to understand customer context and complex interactions. The powerful personalization and summarization capabilities of genAI breathe new life into these categories, letting customer operations finally achieve their promised ROI. Look to invest in them!
- It's a fine balance between risk and reward for newer technologies. Many exciting technologies are out there today. Examples include AI agents, which offload repetitive work from agents; conversational AI, which simulates human conversation; and digital adoption platforms (DAPs), which guide agents through onboarding flows and complex processes. They often show great potential in pilots but don't always deliver results when scaled. Pay attention to people factors like change management and governance to drive user adoption and real transformation.
AI will ultimately disrupt the current customer service tech ecosystem. This will take time. In 2025, I predict that established customer service technology categories will remain as relevant as ever. What will change is their pricing.
Today, vendors offer confusing license tiers and an endless list of add-ons, while locking enterprises into inflexible contracts. Buyers need greater simplicity; value-based pricing built on consumption or outcomes; faster value realization, with more configuration and less customization. This will start to happen next year.
Kate Leggett is a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research.