New Strategic Insights Report - with Upstream Works

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.

New Guest Post for NICE - Their New Branding and CXi Vision

Got another guest post to share - this one is with NICE, where I’ve written about how their new “make experiences flow” branding reflects the thinking behind their CXi approach to today’s contact center challenges. It’s a two-part series on their blog site, and you can read the first one here now; and I’ll post again when the second writeup runs.

Contact Center Pipeline - New Article: Closing the Customer Service Gap

Two new things to share as we slide into what’s going to be a very busy Fall.

First, I have a new article out, running in the September issue of Contact Center Pipeline magazine.. You can read it here, and after that, feel free to peruse the rest of the issue.

Related to that, I’ll be an occasional contributor to Contact Center Pipeline, so expect to see more articles from me, and possibly other forms of involvement.

My Latest Guest Post - Value of Continuous Testing for UCaaS

Got another guest post writeup to share. This one is running on tekVizion’s blog site, and examines the value of continuous testing for UCaaS. Managing all these applications is harder to do than appears, especially since many of them are real-time.

IT cannot possibly keep up with all the updates and performance testing, and when things don’t go to plan, the user experience suffers, and that can really impact UCaaS adoption. The post is running now, and I hope you give it a read. No doubt, tekVizion would love to hear from you as well - they’ve been doing this for a very long time.

New Guest Post for NICE - Call Deflection and Agent Experience

My latest guest post for NICE has now been published, and it’s running here on their blog page. The focus is on call deflection, and how it’s more than just service automation. There are richer benefits to be had, not just for making customer experience better, but agent experience as well. Hope you find it a good read, and more posts will be coming soon.

Next Webinar - with Servion and Cisco; Driving Digital Transformation in the Contact Center

This is the first in a series of webinars I’m doing with Servion, with this one featuring Cisco, highlighting Webex Contact Center. I’ll be talking about trends driving the need for digital CX, and the audience is largely invite-only. However, I’m able to get the word out to my followers, and details to register are here.

The webinar is running Thursday, August 11, but the cutoff to register is Aug. 3. Since this isn’t a totally open event, Servion will review registrations as they come, and then determine who is a good fit beyond the participants they are bringing themselves.

AI and the Contact Center - My Q&A with CEO of Upstream Works

Personal events have put work on the back burner the past couple of weeks, but am slowly getting back to things. I’ve had a few new things in the works that I’ll start sharing over the next few days, with the first one being an exec Q&A I recently did with Rob McDougall, CEO of Upstream Works.

I’ve been doing work with them for a few years now, and Rob was certainly early with AI. A lot of that is finding its way into Upstream’s offerings now, but more importantly, Rob has a pretty good perspective on how contact center leaders need to be thinking about AI. We’re certainly of like mind about these things, and I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Next Webinar - June 9 with Servion

I’ve been on a webinar roll lately, and this time it’s with Servion. They’re a key partner for Cisco, and we’ll be talking about the rise of digital CX, along with what contact centers need to do to support that. Attendance, however, is limited - if interested, please register here, and Servion will get back to you if you meet the profile they’re looking for.

Next Speaking Gig - Five9 CX Summit Canada, Dec. 8

Last month I did the lock note in person at our SCTC conference, and this month I’m presenting at Five9’s CX Summit Canada. This one will be virtual, which is too bad since there are so few industry events in Canada, and otherwise, this one would likely have been right in my back yard.

A gig is a gig, though, and I’m more than happy to share my perspectives on trends and opportunities shaping the contact center. There’s a lot to talk about, and I think attendees will get some good takeaways.

The upside to being a virtual event is that attendance is free, and is open to all. Their target audience of course will be customers, prospects and partners, but others are welcome, and registration is here.

The event is this Wednesday, December 8, and starts at 10:30 ET - and my talk is at 12:10 pm - maybe I’ll “see” you there!

An Enterprise-Wide Approach to Connected Customer Experiences - My Latest White Paper for Cisco

Sometimes my thought leadership outputs are publicly shared right away, sometimes never at all, and yet other times only after a delay in time. This last scenario applies to my latest white paper, and most recent white paper done for Cisco.

The topic speaks to the growing need for businesses to think about CX in broader terms than the contact center. Things are changing quickly in this space and this white paper is a good example of how vendors are trying to educate the market in terms of how to respond.

My white paper was published back in April this year, but was only used internally by Cisco, and wasn’t promoted to other circles. That has recently changed, however, and during last week’s high-profile Webex One event, Cisco included the white paper in their set of resources for channels and end customers.

If you attended the event, you can access the white paper by logging in and going to the Resources section. The white paper is listed there, along with a public link where no further registration is required.

For everyone else - or those who can’t be bothered to log in again to Webex One - here’s a direct public link to the white paper. If you give it a read, I’d love to hear your thoughts, as I believe the contact center is on the verge of some major transformation, and this is an example of what’s coming.

Today is CX Day 2021 - Details Here, Along with Analyst Perspectives

This was new to me - CXPA - the Customer Experience Professionals Association, and today is their big event, CX Day 2021. For those in the CX space - and that seems to be just about everyone lately - this is a highly focused event celebrating the best in both CX and EX - customer experience and employee experience. It’s a global event, by the way, so there’s content and activity specific for various geographies.

Genesys is one of the sponsors, and they engaged myself and some other thought leaders to share our views on CX and DX. They summarized all that in a blog post that ran a few days ago in support of CX Day 2021, and you can read that here. Following that, you should hop over to CX Day here, and check out what’s on offer.

My Latest Podcast with Arkphire - Developing Trust with Remote Workers

From time to time, the folks at UK-based EM360 engage me to host a podcast and interview one of their sponsors. Aside from podcasts, I also contribute guest posts, and am listed in their Tech Index directory.

This time around, I was in conversation with James Buchanan of Dublin-based Arkphire, talking about the challenges faced by their customers to manage remote workers. The pandemic has given rise to work from home, and now hybrid work, and that brings along plenty of technology challenges for both IT leaders and workers. It’s a really timely topic, and here’s the link if you’d like to give it a listen.

Genesys Xperience - My Perspectives on CX and DX on BCStrategies

I’ve been tracking several contact center events lately, and last week was Genesys Xperience. The company always has big updates to share, and the launch of Genesys DX was a highlight. I finally managed to get my takeaways organized, and have put together a post that’s running now on BCStrategies, where I’ve long been a contributor as a BC Expert.

My Next Webinar with NovelVox - Digital Strategy to Transform Customer Service

You may not know NovelVox, but they’re a good under the radar vendor, and I’m doing an educataional webinar with them on July 22. The focus will be the growing role of digital channels to improve CX - customer experience - and the importance of having a strategy to use them effectively. More details are here, along with how to register. Hope you can join us!

Five9 Analyst Summit - My Quick Take

Virtual events with analysts are tricky to plan, especially for pacing out the program. Over the last year, vendors have tried all kinds of formats, but it seems clear that the best approach is to do it in manageable chunks of time. Nobody is going to sit through a day-long marathon of video streaming - it’s just too intense, and too easy for folks to wander off.

Over the past threee days, I’ve been tracking the Five9 Analyst Summit, and they seem to have the right formula - three days and three hours each day - and starting at 10:30 ET, which works pretty well going across multiple global time zones. It’s still a lot of content to digest, and I managed to take in just about all of it - only had to drop out a couple of times.

I’m not going to write up a full research note now, but will share a few takeaways and screenshots here while it’s still fresh. Following a solid Q1 earnings report, the updates we got this week provided detail as to why the company is doing so well.

Much like Zoom has been the right technology at the right time to enable work from home, Five9 provides a pretty complete CCaaS solution as contact centers rush to the cloud. As we heard, 85% of this market is still premises-based, and it’s hard to see why so many players are jumping in with all types of cloud offerings. Being a fully cloud-native contact center pure play, Five 9 is in a great spot right now.

The CCaaS market sure is messy right now - as is the broader customer service/CX space - and for that tangent, I’ll steer you to my latest No Jitter post which came out earlier this week. Coming back to Five9, here are some notable takeaways around the many things they’re doing right.

• Lots of strong growth metrics, but their upmarket success with large enterprise customers catches my eye the most, with 45% YoY revenue growth. and 83% of Q1 business revenue. All cloud vendors will book their share of smaller customers, but I think it’s the ability to sell into this end of the market that will create the most sustainable value and growth for Five9.

• We heard lots about their culture, and it’s a strong selling point for them as an organization. They’ve built out a solid managment team along with proven industry leaders on the sales side, and as CEO Rowan Trollope noted, it’s a place now “where nobody leaves” - in a good way, of course!

• Plenty of updates around innovation - I’m not that technical, but their Inference acquisition is a good example with IVA - intelligent virtual agent - to help automate customer service - as is Whendu, which helps contact centers with complex legacy integrations migrate to the cloud. Aside from acquistions, they’ve added over 150 developers, and are maintaining R&D spend at a solid 12% of revenues. This is just a taste of what they’re doing, and the main idea here is that they’re holding their own, and then some, in a very competitive space that is evolving quickly.

• So much more to talk about, and before I close off with some screenshots that can be shared, the intangibles of leadership have a lot to do with their success. You might be surprised to know that Five9 started in 2001, so this isn’t exactly a startup with wheels or a unicorn with hardly any revenues. They’ve been at this a long time, and both President Dan Burkland and CEO Rowan Trollope shared a clear vision for where they’re going and why they’ve been so successful, especially in this big moment of CCaaS adoption. Rowan kicked this event off talking about re-imagining CX and taking a clean slate approach with cloud and AI, and to build around the emerging “multi-modal” workforce, where both human agents and chatbots play key roles in transforming customer service into a highly personalized experience. Easier said than done, but they’re definitely on the right track - leading and not following.

CCaaS - Rethinking Your CX Strategy - My Latest on No Jitter

If you’re a fan of Buffalo Springfield, you’ll like my latest article on No Jitter.

If you want know why and how the contact center space has become so messy - but really interesting - you’ll like it even better. There are many flavors of CCaaS now, and new visions are emerging for what constitutes “customer service”, and what CX really means.

That’s my pitch, and to read the article, here’s the link. I hope you like it, and as always, comments and sharing are welcome.

My Next Webinar with Mitel - 2021 Roadmap for Digital CX

I recently wrote a white paper for Mitel on the importance of digital CX - customer experience - for contact centers, and the impact of COVID-19 on what constitutes a good CX. The white paper has been well-received, and we recently did a Twitter chat on the topic, which was also well-received.

We’re topping all this out now with a webinar, which will be on Thursday, March 4. I’ll be presenting highlights from the white paper, and along with Mitel’s Matt Clare, we’ll be talking about the current state of digital CX, and how contact centers should be thinking about their roadmap. You can register here to join us in real time, and if you can’t make it, the webinar will be available on demand from Mitel shortly after.

Embracing Contact Center AI in 2021 - My Latest for Upstream Works

I recently finished a 3-part series for Upstream Works on CX drivers for 2021, and the last piece focused on AI. Contact center has long been a prime use case for AI, both for improving CX and supporting agent engagement.

Lots of ground to cover, and this Insight Report has been posted now on their site. As with the other writeups in this series, the content is gated, so you need to register to get the download. Once there, you can download my earlier writeups in this series, as well as other content they have there.

Next SCTC Fireside Chat - AI for Consultants, Part 5 -This Wednesday

What started as a basic exploration of a hot topic - AI for consultants - has turned into a 5-part series that I’ve been presenting on for SCTC. It’s been a great series, and we close out the topic this Wednesday. Joining me will be Gordon Sexton of Genesys, who will add his take to mine.

As always, our Fireside Chats are from 12-1 EST on Wednesdays, and for members who miss the date, replays are available. For everyone else, you can always become a member if you’re a consultant - otherwise, just follow me here, or drop me a line if you need help developing an AI strategy. To join us this Wednesday, details and signup are here.

My Next SCTC Fireside Chat on AI - This Wednesday, with Avaya

Tomorrow, our ongoing series about the AI opportunity for consultants continues with Part 4. I’ll be providing a recap of the key themes covered from the earlier sessions, as well as my outlook for 2021.

Joining me will be Tracy Fleming from Avaya, who will address specific AI use cases in the contact center, and as always, the sessions will be led by Steve Leaden. Registration details have now been posted to the SCTC website, and I hope you can join us - tomorrow from 12-1 EST.