We’re back after another thrilling week in communication, collaboration, and customer experience.
If you haven’t been able to keep track of all the fantastic news stories that we’ve been sharing over the last week, don’t worry – your weekly roundup is here.
This week, we got a deep-dive look at the CCaaS Magic Quadrant from Gartner, and we shared our very own UC trends roundtable on the evolving state of customer experience. We also took you on a tour of Zendesk’s Sunshine conversations and introduced the new CCaaS platform from Avaya.
Ready to check out the top stories?
Who’s Leading the CCaaS Magic Quadrant?
The release of a new Magic Quadrant from Gartner always causes a bit of a stir, whether you’re looking into collaboration tools, UCaaS, or even contact centre solutions. Recently, we got a chance to dive into the Contact Centre as a Service report for 2019, and we took a look at both the North America and Western Europe lists, so you could see who’s competing all around the globe.
Interestingly, a few of the top contenders remained the same in both segments of the world, such as NICE inContact and Talkdesk. We also saw the loss of a few key players now that Gartner has changed its inclusion criteria to represent the evolving marketplace. Check out the leaders, challengers, niche players and visionaries here.
Slack Celebrates New Phase of Salesforce Partnership
Recently, we’ve seen an increase in the number of vendors from all parts of the communication and collaboration industry working together. Ultimately, the biggest brands are beginning to recognise that if they want to compete in the changing industry, they need to be willing to play nice with other companies. Slack and Salesforce are two providers in the workplace tool space that have had no problem joining forces in the past.
This week, Slack announced the next phase of its relationship with Salesforce, which includes the arrival of automated notifications, information sharing between services, and an enhanced search and preview functionality too.
UC Trends 2020: Customer Experience
It’s safe to say that customer experience is one of the biggest trends in any industry right now, with all companies striving to show their clients how much they care. According to the Temkin group, around 86% of buyers would pay extra if they knew they were going to get a good customer experience. So, how are vendors going to make sure that they stay ahead of the curve with their CX in 2020?
We spoke to some of the market leaders in CX solutions from Ribbon, Tollring, Akixi and Donoma to find out. Our latest roundtable includes insights into the biggest trends that have changed the industry throughout 2019, as well as the major events that could cause a stir as we move into 2020.
Zendesk Introduces Sunshine Conversations
Looking for something new from your messaging experience? Zendesk could have just the thing that you need. One of the leading providers of customer experience solutions worldwide, Zendesk, recently announced its new Sunshine Conversations solution. The API-focused platforms gives today’s companies the tools they need to integrate direct messaging and social media messaging into their existing communication strategies when connecting with customers.
According to Gartner, by the time we reach 2022, around 70% of all customer interactions will involve tools like machine learning systems, chatbots, and mobile messaging. Sunshine Conversations could be one of the tools leading the way towards a new era of customer contact.
Avaya Introduces Its New CCaaS Platform
Another week has passed, but we still can’t stop talking about Avaya and it’s exciting partnership with RingCentral. As part of the incredible GITEX event, Avaya spoke to our very own Patrick Watson about their new collaboration with RingCentral, and also announced the arrival of their cutting edge CCaaS solution, called IX-CC. This cloud-native contact centre as a service offering will give customers all the benefits of a cloud deployment for their contact centre.
Avaya also announced a new partnership with Microsoft as part of its launch for IX-CC. Avaya will be using the global network run by Microsoft to manage and host IX-CC through Azure. Availability for IX-CC will roll out worldwide over the course of the months to come.
What were your favourite stories from the last week? Let us know by joining the conversation in the comments below or on social media!
