Customer support has become a crowded battlefield in enterprise technology as software vendors such as Microsoft Corp. and Salesforce.com Inc. rush to arm organizations with tools to create one-stop service centers.high turnover rates and minimal corporate investment.
But as more companies move those systems to the internet, that mindset is undergoing a seismic shift.A new survey finds that consumers are fed up with endless telephone wait times and glitchy automated menus. Why aren’t companies listening? The goal is to tap the technology to power software that can automatically provide insights on customers for agents during calls to improve communications. While some of that capability is available with existing products, it will be several years before it’s fully operational.
“Right now, there’s a lot of different competitors coming into this market from different angles,” said Gartner analyst Drew Kraus. “It will almost certainly go through some type of market consolidation. But for now, more people are getting in than getting out.” “The whole notion of having a contact center whose entire focus is about limiting interactions with customers because that’s a cost, that is being challenged,” said Simonetta Turek, the general manager of Twilio’s call center product, Flex.
Constructing a system where all those programs work together could also prove difficult. For the past two decades, software-as-a-service providers built guardrails around their products that prevented data from being easily shared.