“AI seems to be doing things that we thought were impossible before. And it's not, of course, just chatbots. It's every part of the contact center.Jonathan [Rosenberg], our CTO and head of AI, came in and said he's identified -- within three months -- 30 different parts of the contact center that he thinks we can transform using different approaches and modern technology.”
“Developer-driven is good, but in a lot of cases it's not the only thing and it's not enough. In certain cases, companies have the ability to write software, do their own product management and innovate. They can take a developer-led approach, they can take APIs and do great things.For a lot of companies, contact center is not their expertise. Software is not their expertise. Product management is not their expertise. What they really need is a suite that's already built, can be configured, goes across all of the different products and they literally can go in, configure, and go. And for the pieces that they really need to innovate in, they still have the APIs, they still have the SDKs, they can still be creative.”
“We saw this when the open-source PBX came out and the idea was exactly the same. We're going to give you freeware, you build on top of it, and create customized applications. You can build a unique PBX and the total cost of ownership will be less.… And then the first issues happened, and it became who do you call, who put it together? This development kit of contact center is different than this one and this one. The IT department is stuck supporting it and the CIO or the CEO says, ‘Who's running my contact center? What is our core business?’”
“It is fundamentally untrue that you can slap some APIs on the side of your monolithic architecture and claim that it is as customizable as something that is designed to be customized.… as long as you want it to do the thing that the product managers designed it to do, then great. But the moment you want to do something different, the moment you want to tailor it to your business, it doesn't do anything.”
“We've got a number of customers who were struggling with how they move to cloud. It's not a simple one size fits all for any single customer. The way we've approached it is to enable them to take technology at a pace that makes sense for them. If they choose to bring some of their agents onto a cloud service, they can do that. We simply allow that.It really comes down to what's the customer trying to solve for and what's the pace at which they can afford to transition to a cloud service. It is not a one size fits all and it's not a flash cut.”
“We have 1,200 new customers the last two years and the vast majority of those customers purchased a cloud solution and implemented a cloud solution. That is the trend that is absolutely happening.I'd say people go at a different pace and so to think that like you they want to have the same train at the same station, go at the same time, to the same destination is a little naïve. I really believe people are going to migrate at their own pace, but the world is moving to cloud.”
I hope you feel that this gives you a good flavor of the conversation these six contact center enterprise titans had at Enterprise Connect. But I also hope it leaves you hungry for more. If so, click here to listen to the entire session.
From the mainstage at last week’s Enterprise Connect event, six contact center leaders reflect on AI, cloud, developer-led, and other trends.
