Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Last week Cisco held its annual Contact Center Sales Summit in Hollywood, Florida. This year's gathering of product managers, sales overlays, channels, and technology partners increased in size by 50% and, for the first time, included some customers. Cisco collaboration applications business grew 15% last fiscal year, a noticeable uplift over the previous ones. It gave the company the opportunity to share its ambitions for its contact center product line.

Image credit: Shift in the playing field by Ranganath Krishnamani, spinning top

In part 1 of the series, we looked at technologies for self-service and customer interaction over the various channels. In this second part, I would like to cover process and analytics, the two other layers of the landscape.

Here’s my main message from last week’s conference in Newark – the future of voice has nothing to do with telephony.

In fact, the future of voice has nothing to do with telephony, and it doesn’t have much to do with PCs or mobile phones either.

These are the cornerstones of the business communications world we know so well, so how can this be? What’s left?

Consumer preferences for customer service have quickly evolved over the past few years, and in order to effectively compete, businesses need to identify and recognize these preferences. To help organizations better understand the current state of customer service, Five9 partnered with Zogby Analytics to survey Business Decision Makers (BDMs) with 100 or more employees about the state of customer service and support and the role that customer service plays in various business considerations. The survey focused on three key areas:

Image credit: "A is for Automation," by Thomas Brechler

New leadership team, new energy. That’s what the analysts who attended the Cisco Collaboration Analyst Summit got to experience. Led by the effervescent Amy Chang, Cisco’s collaboration team is enthusiastic, passionate, and energetic, ready to take on old and new competitors in the collaboration space. The team is focused on growth and celebrated 24% year-over-year growth with champagne and cupcakes for the analysts (I’d also like to give a shout out to Chuck Robbins who took time out of his busy earnings announcement day to meet with the analysts and answer questions).

Sometimes analysts have a really tough job, yet some how we manage to persevere. Recently Alcatel Lucent Enterprise (ALE) celebrated its 100^th anniversary and held its analyst conference in the principality of Monaco, home to the Monte Carlo casino, the royal palace, and lots of really, really expensive cars. Among the glitz and glamor, ALE presented its strategy and roadmap to around 40 communications and networking analysts, while providing us with an update about their successes to date.

The company’s key focus areas are around several areas: