The development environment is the window to companies' software package souls. If you understand how to build applications on a piece of software, you have also learned how it works. Turns out there is no lack of windows to the soul of a contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) system in 2025.
As generative artificial intelligence (genAI) and large language models open new opportunities and capabilities for CCaaS systems, the vendors are adding tools to their offerings. Building a genAI-led conversation is not the same as building a directed dialogue flow driven by a natural language speech engine. Similarly, agent copilots do many of the same things that chatbots do, but they are different with different user interfaces and different functions.
To give you a better sense of which types or new tools are required, here is a partial list of the tools vendors have shown me as part of my evaluation of platforms for my "CCaaS Wave" report:
- Flow builder for basic interactive voice response interactions;
- Flow builder for AI driven chat or voice bots;
- Prompt builder for generative AI prompting;
- Intent building tools for traditional natrural language understanding interaction building; and
- Generative AI prompt builders for writing genAI routines that build intents and utterances for traditional natural language understanding interactions.
And it goes on from there… I';m still trying to get my head around all the different offerings from the various vendors, and I've been at this a few weeks. One vendor shared a list of 10 development tools that could be used to build applications on its platform.
I bet this sounds like I'm complaining, but I'm not. All of this is very good news for contact centers. There are so many cool new things you can do with CCaaS systems, such as the following:
- Provide agents with next-best-action recommendations driven by LLMs based on the current conversation;
- Answer any customer question from a knowledge base;
- Summarize calls for agents when they are done; and
- Improve self-service with chatbots that understand what a customer wants and get them to the right resource immediately.
The functions above need an application to define the details of what they are to do, or at least some very complex configuration. These new tools are entering our lives to support agents and customers in new and better ways. The problem is that we are in the between times. It can take years to replace even the worst IVR if it is connected to two different back-end systems and supports several different queries to check on the status of an order or a support ticket. The vendors are also under a lot of pressure to bring new functionality to market quickly and a separate stand-alone tool can be rolled out much faster than one that must coexist within the same environment as another tool that performs similar functions.
In these between times it's important that you understand which tools you will be using and why. Make your current or prospective CCaaS vendor give you a good demo of all their tools, and make sure you are clear on the function of each one. You will be one step closer to seeing the soul of your CCaaS system.
Max Ball is a principal analyst at Forrester Research.