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A short note for navigating this section - scroll below for the most recent posts, and then for more, click on the Blog Archive box, where you can view all of my posts, going back to the beginning in March 2005.
Last week, I was a guest analyst on UK-based Big CX News, hosted by Charlie Mitchell. He had a full panel of thought leaders, and it was fun sharing all of our perspectives on some recent big news items. Hope to do it again soon, and hope you check it out - here’s the link.
Longer-form writing takes, well, longer to do, longer to be reviewed, and longer to be published. I do a lot of writing for all lengths, and here’s a current example of what I call an Insight Report. This would be longer than an article, shorter than a white paper, but substantive enough to be gated content.
I’ve been working with Upstream Works Software for a few years now, and when the stars line up, we do a couple of these annually. The latest one has been posted to their website, and here’s the registration page to get it.
The title is pretty self-explanatory, and speaks to a key trend driving just about everything in the contact center space these days: The AI Opportunity - Enhance the Agent and Customer Experience with AI Application Integrations. I hope you like it, and if any questions, just drop me a line.
We all know how that song goes, and it’s the theme song for this week’s SCTC Fireside Chat. I’ll be in conversation with the host, Steve Leaden - and fellow SIPtoner - where I’ll share highlights from my recent run of travel to various industry events. This should be fun, and after the chat, you should check out the SCTC for yourself.
Here’s the 5 second trailer on Youtube, and details are here to sign up. Our Fireside Chats are from 12-1 ET most Wednesdays, and hope you can join us then!
The December issue of JAA’s Communications and Collaboration Review is out now, along with the latest Watch This Space podcast. As the thumb below shows, Chris and I did a roundup of the November events I attended, along with our 2022 takeaways. Hope you like it!
If you’re not a subscriber, signing up to my newsletter is easy - the signup page is here. For my podcast, you can subscribe on all the major platforms, or just pick up the current episode here.
If you’re not familiar with my website, there are archives for both the newsletter and the podcast. The refresh for the podcast archive is almost complete, so it’s very easy to find and listen to earlier episodes there. For the newsletter archive, the updates are mostly done, but haven’t gone live yet - coming soon!
Another busy month with travel to events, but three public things I’d been working on were published last month, so here they are if you haven’t seen them yet.
AI for the Contact Center - It’s So Much More than Chatbots, NICE, Nov. 30
Vendors Use AI to Boost Customer Experience in the Contact Center, No Jitter, Nov. 15
The AI Opportunity: Enhance the Agent and Customer Experience with AI Application Integrations, Upstream Works, Nov. 4
With the sub-title being “It’s so much more than chatbots”, you should get the gist pretty quickly. AI has become a must-have for contact centers, and while chatbots are often the entry point for getting on this path, the use cases are much richer.
My analysis examines the drivers for embracing AI, but also for taking a practical approach that gets beyond the hype. The white paper has been featured now on NICE’s website, and here’s the registration page to download a copy.
UK-based EM360 enlists me to host podcasts with their sponsors from time to time, and for this episode, I was in conversation with Mark Sher from Intermedia. There’s a lot of ground to cover with cloud migration, and in the case of UCaaS - as well as CCaaS - the challenge is educating the end buyer about the rationale.
This is very much a you-can’t-get-there-from-here story, and for anyone still on the fence about cloud for business communications, you’ll want to check our podcast out. I’ve long had a nice rapport with Mark, and I hope you’ll enjoy the discussion. Here’s the link, and if you like what’s on tap, I’m sure Mark and his team would love to tell you more.
On Thursday, Dec. 1, Five9 is running the 2022 edition of their CX Summit Canada, and I’ve been brought back again to provide an overview of the contact center market. I’m part of a larger program running through the day - all of it virtual - and later, I’ll be joining an in-person reception in downtown Toronto. The Five9 folks will determine who can attend, and to find out more, here’s the registration link.
New things come up for me pretty regularly, and this time around, I was a guest on CX Pulse, which NICE’s regular podcast. Hosted by Amelia Earhart, we covered some ground around the need to take a digital approach to improving the agent experience. With so much focus on customer experience, it’s easy to overlook the needs of agents, and how important that is for providing great customer experience.
This is my first time being on Amelia’s podcast, and I hope you like it - here’s link to give it a listen.
I’m part of the UC Expert Team with BCStrategies, and we take turns contributing our perspectives to No Jitter. It’s my turn this week, and with all the industry events I’ve been attending lately, there’s plenty to talk about. There are many stories to tell for how AI is being used in the contact center - some is transformative, and some is more incremental, but overall, it’s a dominant trend now.
I can only cover so much ground in one article, and over the course my recent work with vendors, I’ve provided a brief update on what four vendors are doing - Cisco, NICE, Twilio and Dialpad. Each really warrants its own article, and the same can be said for other vendors I’m following just as closely. My writeup is running now on No Jitter, and as always, comments and sharing are both welcome. If this piques your interest in a longer analysis, I’m not hard to find!
Upstream Works is an innovative Canadian contact center vendor, and I’ve been doing various things with them for a few years now. One of these includes writing Strategic Insight reports - not quite as long as a white paper, but substantive enough to require registration for downloading.
My most recent Strategic Insight report for them has been published now, titled The AI Opportunity: Enhance the Agent and Customer Experience with AI Application Integrations. If that’s top of mind for you, and would like to read about it, here’s the link.
I usually publish these on the first Tuesday of the month, but with all the travel happening now, things had to slide for one day, but they’re running now. The timing is also impacted by how the calendar falls, and for November, the first Tuesday happens to be on the 1st, and I usually don’t have everything ready on the 1st of the month. I don’t have any sponsors, so nobody is cancelling contracts on me, and subscribers haven’t bailed, and best I can tell, the world is still turning.
So, the November issue of JAA’s Communications and Collaboration Review is out now, along with the latest Watch This Space podcast. As the thumb below shows, Chris and I did a roundup of the various industry events running the past few weeks. I could easily do an episode on each event, so we only touched on a few high points.
If you’re not a subscriber, signing up to my newsletter is easy - the signup page is here. For my podcast, you can subscribe on all the major platforms, or just pick up the current episode here.
If you’re not familiar with my website, there are archives for both the newsletter and the podcast. The refresh for the podcast archive is almost complete, so it’s very easy to find and listen to earlier episodes there. For the newsletter archive, the updates are mostly done, but haven’t gone live yet - coming soon!
With all the event travel the past few weeks, it’s been a real challenge keeping on top of my regular work. Cisco had an analyst-only event recently as a preview for their WebexOne virtual event. The updates were under NDA until that event, so that’s another reason why I haven’t posted about it here.
At this point, none of this will be news to anyone following Cisco Webex, so my comments will be short. I’ll expand on this, though, in some upcoming posts, but time is also very short right now, so I need to get this posted before boarding my flight.
In short, Cisco looks to have the most complete portfolio to fully support hybrid work and contact center - not just for their platforms, but for the devices, the hardware and all the networking technology that makes all of this go. It’s a pretty impressive range of capabilities, but that also poses some challenges in terms of selling all of this, as there are different economic buyers for these pieces.
Also very interesting is their approach to competing against the rest of this very crowded market, especially Microsoft. Just as Teams can run inside Webex, Webex can now run inside Teams, giving customers totally flexibility for using both, and that reflects the reality of this now being a multi-platform market.
Other highlights included a new feature - audio watermarking - and they’re taking a leadership role in helping enterprises re-imaging their workspaces - quite a few new pieces around that, actually. Also, lots of AI updates, including applications that help workers manage their “focus time” to stay productive. I got a great hologram demo as well, and it’s really not that hard to envision workplace use cases coming to life as adoption gains traction. Finally, I should add that their contact center story is stronger than you might think, as are their CPaaS capabilities - Webex Connect. That’s all for now, but I’m not done with this update.
Webex execs, Jeetu Patel, Javed Kahn and Lorrissa Horton
With all the travel this month, not much writing got done, although I did share several posts with short commentary and photos on my blog, so those might be worth checking out as well. I did write a few articles, though, but only one was published on a public site this month, so this roundup will be pretty, pretty short.
Balancing Remote Work Privacy Vs. Productivity Monitoring, TechTarget, Oct. 21
Three more travel stops to go before the Fall event-a-palooza is done. Crazy time for industry events, but I’m over the hump, and the next trips are just one stop at a time, yay.
Flying this aft to San Francisco - again - and I go back yet again next week too - for the Twilio SIGNAL event. I’m not a developer, but have always loved this event, especially because they often do it with creative flair. There are actually two parts to SIGNAL, with a one-day analyst-only program tomorrow, and then the much larger-scale virtual event for everyone the next two days after that. I’m just there for the analyst program, then flying back home.
I’ll share what I can while there, and will follow on with more thoughts soon after. Still back-logged from last week, so there will be a post or two coming about that when time allows. Until then, I need to get my newsletter done - podcast is already done - and if we don’t publish tomorrow, they’ll be out on Wednesday for sure. Busy, busy….
Just have time for a quick photo mashup before flying home to Toronto. This is the end of my 9-day, 3-event road trip, and will catch up on blogging from other events next week. I’ve just finished attending the RingCentral analyst event, in posh Napa Valley.
Pretty nice place to get spoiled, but it’s rather isolated for such a short event. No complaints, though, and they gave us a pretty extensive update on the state of their business, along with lots of NDA updates coming later this year and into 2023. I’ll have more to say soon, but it’s almost time to board my flight.
Below - one of my industry favorites, CIO Kira Makagon leading off Day 2. Two panel sessions - with customers, moderated by Blair Pleasant, and the channel panel, led by Zane Long.
The Napa vibe - a few photos from walking around the venue - what’s not to like?
But wait, there’s more! They had the NBA championship trophy on display, so I had to get next to it and make sure all the Celtics titles are there - yes they are, phew. Napa = wine, so they took us to Tamber Bey Vineyards for a wine tasting meal - it was every bit as good as it looks. The owners are also seriously into horses, so this made for a really great mix, wow. Finally, a 5-minute diversion to get a photo after crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. Yeah, it’s been a good week!
All in a week’s work, huh? Last week was Marrakesh and London, and now some US-based travel. Never done 3 events in a row, but starting today, it’s Cisco’s analyst event in San Jose. From there, off to Dallas for the SCTC annual conference, where I’m giving the locknote talk on Wed. Also, we’re doing another SIPtones gig on Monday night (you can check out some of our clips here) - woo hoo. Then, it’s back to San Francisco for RingCentral’s analyst event in Napa. Never dull!
Before the moment passes entirely - this is my first chance to share some photos here from last week’s CCTC networking event in Toronto. Canadian telecom and tech consultants rarely have events where all can gather, so this was a welcome development, led by long-time consultant Cheryl Helm.
We had a decent turnout, including a handful who participated virtually. Probably most importantly, the content was top-notch, from beginning to end. The networking was good too, but I think everyone went home feeling a bit smarter about that state of things with communications technology.
Oh, and I’d be remiss in saying to all my Canadian colleagues - happy Thanksgiving!
Below - Cheryl Helm leading things off, and Scott Murphy and the interoperability panel.
Below - the Foxhole - Roberta and Steve running their command center to keep everything moving. My locknote talk - if you’re attending the SCTC conference later this month in Dallas, my locknote there will be based on this, so not to worry if you didn’t catch it here.
This is probably the only time in my life I’ll get to these two places in one run, but it’s happening.
Yup, “they’re taking me to Marrakesh… all aboard, the plane…” Well, something like that. If you got my latest newsletter, I amplified that there, along with a Youtube clip of the CSN (Crosby, Stills and Nash for those of you too young to know) classic hit - which no doubt you’re singing along to right now. And if not, then listen to the song, and then you will be.
I’ll share updates as things go along, but first stop is Marrakesh for the NICE Analyst Summit. Will we rock the casbah? That’s for me know and you to find out. The jet-setting continues with a stop in London for the UC Expo, and I’ll be on two panels on the Thursday - details here. That’s all for now - gotta get packing - and after all this, won’t you give me a smile?
Am a bit behind in posting this update. First Tuesday of the month is my usual publishing date. Both went live then, and am just getting a chance now to blog about it.
The October issue of JAA Communications and Collaboration Review is out now, along with the latest Watch This Space podcast. Bulding on last month’s topic around quiet quitting, Chris and I took the flip side with quiet firing for this episode, along with our takes on the latest hybrid work challenges, and what Salesforce might have in mind with Digital HQ.
If not a subscriber, signing up to my newsletter is easy - the signup page is here. For my podcast, you can subscribe on all the major platforms, or just pick up the current episode here. If you’re not familiar with my website, there are archives for the newsletter and the podcast, and a refresh for each of these archives is in the works now.
J Arnold & Associates is an Independent Technology Research and Analyst, helping businesses understand the strategic value of communications technology as they adapt to the digital transformation of work
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