This was the theme of Enterprise Connect 2024, and the dominant topic was how to use artificial intelligence (AI) to create personalized, empathetic interactions between customers and employees.
In addition, attendees learned how to integrate AI into their plans to build or optimize their tech stacks based on the industry growth projections.
During the breakout session “Contact Center/CX 2027: What Will Drive the Market,” David Myron, Principal Analyst at Omdia, shared findings from the firm’s recent research on customer experience industry growth. In 2027, global contact center as a service (CCaaS) sales are predicted to reach $12.7 billion, up from $7.7 billion in 2023, according to the research firm. It is projected to reach $9.5 billion this year. Artificial intelligence is impossible without the cloud. Both offer significant benefits to businesses.
Cloud computing is the key to harnessing AI
Several attendees wanted to learn about using AI for customer and employee experience, while others wanted to enhance or extend their use of it. Experts advised that the first step is to migrate CX platforms to the cloud.
As Nathalie DeChellis, Senior Director, Product Marketing at Genesys, pointed out during the CX Green Room livestreamed from the conference, a cloud-based solution allows for a push-pull model to share data across your entire CX tech stack. As well as allowing organizations to orchestrate and optimize experiences in real time, the cloud enables businesses to keep up with AI’s continuous innovation.
Experiences that are better are within reach
Organizations can improve customer and employee experiences by integrating artificial intelligence into customer experience strategies.
Among the AI applications currently in use, Metrigy found the following (in order of popularity):
- Agent assist
- Text analytics
- Translation
- Natural language processing
- Speech analytics
- Conversational AI
- Transcriptions
- Predictive AI
- Sentiment analysis
- Generative AI
About 70% of companies intend to spend more on AI to improve customer satisfaction, and 26 percent to reduce employee attrition.
Organizations are implementing the technology into many of the activities and interactions they already do in the contact center. However, when they apply AI to new things, he said, that’s when the real disruption begins.