Yes, it’s great to see old friends face to face again, but more importantly, it’s energising to see so many great vendors, buyers and influencers interested in what they have to show and tell. Sixty years ago, in his address in the Assembly Hall at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, President John F. Kennedy said “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”
My observation about the C&CC Expo this year was that it demonstrated the reality of what we knew was possible ten to twenty years ago in terms of the SaaS business model and the benefits of the API driven economy. The show was dominated by the Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) community and those Value-Added Resellers offering their best choice CCaaS partner, combined with an ‘on the ground’ representation of that CCaaS providers marketplace.
What was so striking to me was how much the show layout itself represented the contact centre technology landscape. With the big CCaaS vendors occupying the premium space, the palm trees in the oasis next to the waterholes, and the specialist application vendors nestled closely around them. The more relevant and important the application vendor, the closer they were to the palm trees and the waterholes. The most relevant and interesting to visit were those application vendors that could help make sense of unstructured data. The less they could, the closer they were to the desert at the back of the hall.
Gartner estimates that unstructured data now represents an astounding 80 – 90% of all new enterprise data, and it’s growing 3X faster than structured data. Remembering JFK’s quote, now take a look at this article published in 2019 Insight-driven organisation | Deloitte Insights.
From an industry veteran’s standpoint, it feels like the future has now arrived. The beauty of SaaS delivering the ‘pay as you go’ CCaaS functionality, combined with a structured array of supporting AI driven application vendors, is that they all demonstrate a slightly different way that their product delivers the same solution to the same old set of problems that we’ve struggled with for decades.
What that means for ‘the contact centre tech’ customer’ is a huge amount of choice and a world of opportunity to refresh and upgrade operational functionality. The key point is that the tech’ on show at C&CC Expo this year gives every buyer (big and small) a chance to improve the engagement process (CX & EX) whilst at the same time, make a significant improvement in margin across the short, medium and long term.
If you need help in understanding what contact centre tech’ is the ‘best fit’ to improve your operating margins over the short, medium and long term, then get in touch. We’re here to help.
