On the heels of a large $100 million B-round, Talkdesk held its third customer and partner conference, OpenTalk. In seven years, the company established a name for itself in the contact center market. Let’s explore this new entrant in the customer interaction management space.
Twilio held its Signal conference in San Francisco. The event gathered 3,000 developers and customers and was packed with product announcements. It came shortly after the company announced its intent to buy SendGrid, its largest-ever acquisition. Let me share my takeaways.
A Flurry of Announcements
The company made five product announcements:
Referring to Salesforce Service Cloud as a new entrant in the customer interaction management space is almost an oxymoron. With a run rate of over $3 Billion, it looks more like a gorilla. Yet, Service Cloud is mostly known for case management. I spoke with Bill Patterson, who became its General Manager last summer. He agrees that the market is not well aware of its interaction management capabilities. Let’s explore what it has to offer.
I am excited to share the second iteration of my Customer Interaction Management market landscape. It has been more than 18 months since I released the first version and an update was overdue. The number of participants has jumped from 450 to 650. The steep increase is due to new entrants and the expansion of the market footprint. The Customer Experience (CX) imperative has reshaped the landscape. It is impacting many parts of organizations and interaction management investments are no longer limited to customer service departments.
In August 2016, Twilio dropped a mini bomb in the Contact Center space announcing that ING Bank, one of the largest financial institutions in the world would replace its 17 separate legacy call centers systems with one global solution built on its APIs. Twilio has been growing steadily its presence in the customer interaction management space and it is time to explore its solution set.