Market estimates show the potential: IDC estimates global AI investment to reach $632 billion by 2028. Within that estimate, the U.S. will contribute $336 billion in AI investments. One of the key investment areas IDC calls out is customer experience (CX), which is a golden opportunity for the channel to enable and drive innovation.
When it comes to leveraging AI to improve the customer experience, businesses want support in the form of AI technical expertise, strategy and implementation. They also need expert guidance in selecting the right AI-enabled solutions for their business. This creates an opportunity for Trusted Advisors, who have decades of experience in guiding clients through the evolving technology landscape so their organizations can thrive in this fast-moving market.
According to Canalys, the projected generative AI revenue stream for channel providers will be $158.6 billion by 2028. This is in addition to an earlier report by Gartner that pointed to 80% of customer service and support organizations using generative AI technology to improve agent productivity and customer experience by 2025.
UCaaS and CCaaS: The Intersection of AI-Driven CX
Unified communications (UC) emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s. UC integrates communication tools such as voice, video, file sharing and messaging into a single platform to enhance business communication, collaboration and productivity, while reducing costs.
With the evolution of cloud computing, unified communications as a service (UCaaS) has gained popularity by providing a variety of communication and collaboration tools through third-party providers over IP networks. The rise of remote work and the demand for effective collaboration tools have led many UCaaS offerings to include video and text functionality. Additionally, there is an increasing overlap with contact center as a service (CCaaS) due to integrations with CRM systems.
Today, UCaaS and CCaaS platforms are foundational solutions for optimizing the customer experience. However, there are several distinctions of note. First and foremost, CCaaS is fundamentally more centered on the customer journey. This has driven many UCaaS providers to integrate CCaaS functionality into their platforms, allowing for a more comprehensive offering. Furthermore, CCaaS solutions often feature a broader array of AI capabilities compared to traditional UCaaS options. This is primarily due to the nature of CCaaS, which offers multiple entry points for customer interactions, thereby enabling businesses to deliver heightened value and personalized experiences to their clients.
As customer expectations evolve, the integration of CCaaS and UCaaS platforms is not just a trend but a step toward improving how organizations communicate and engage with their customers. By leveraging the strengths of both solutions, businesses can create a more cohesive and effective customer engagement strategy that drives satisfaction and loyalty.
Transforming CX with Automation and Personalization
There are several ways AI can impact UCaaS and CCaaS and businesses wanting to integrate AI into the customer experience should examine these solutions from several vantage points. They first will look for improvements to internal processes using automation and machine learning (ML). Automating routine tasks will allow customer service to devote more time to difficult or complex inquiries.
Next, because personalization and deeper insights are also key customer experience goals, AI can help businesses use data analytics to deliver recommendations and content more uniquely suited to an individual. For example, data is being fed into AI-trained models, which can suggest a new product or service based on customer behaviors and preferences. AI can also add value by providing more powerful feedback. Through sentiment analysis of customer interactions, businesses can gauge sentiment and emotional tone, enabling them to fine-tune a customer response further.
IntelePeer: Creating a CX-AI Vision
AI’s role in enhancing the customer experience is just now starting to come to fruition. It’s an exciting time as we’re starting to see companies like IntelePeer creating a vision of how AI can elevate the customer experience while providing opportunities for Trusted Advisors to grow their business and monetize these technologies.
IntelePeer’s Conversational AI platform automates customer communications. Through its Customer Interaction Intent Study, IntelePeer highlights how it used advanced data analysis to find opportunities to implement generative AI, resulting in a great customer experience and decreased labor costs, all while ensuring ROI.
End-user feedback and behavior offer valuable insights to Trusted Advisors regarding what users need and how they prefer those needs to be met to ensure a positive customer experience. IntelePeer has reported conducting numerous studies each quarter, resulting in a noticeable increase in contract value. Businesses are eager to understand how to leverage AI to achieve real business outcomes, cost savings and enhanced customer experience. These studies provide them with a clear path to reach those goals.
The Role of the Trusted Advisor
Following the pandemic, awareness around the use of UCaaS and CCaaS platforms grew tremendously, but as AVANT Analytics data shows, many companies are still either in the market or on the cusp of entering the market for these types of solutions. In the UCaaS State of Disruption Report, researchers found through an Interactive Quick Assessment (IQA) that 57% of respondents are “still learning” about available UCaaS solutions, while 31% are actively looking at UCaaS providers.
As interest in UCaaS and CCaaS continues to grow, along with the increased use of AI across the technology stack, the key message to the channel is clear: AI and customer experience are now interconnected. This is the perfect time for Trusted Advisors to assist their clients in navigating the wealth and complexity of emerging AI-related options. By tailoring recommendations to specific needs and industry focus, they can provide valuable guidance.
Businesses will need support and counsel from Trusted Advisors on all of these solution options, as well as emerging technologies like synthetic data that can be a substitute for real customer data, which is often limited by usability, privacy regulations and other constraints. Gartner estimates by “2026, 75% of businesses will use generative AI to create synthetic customer data, up from less than 5% in 2023.” Furthermore, synthetic data can be used to develop customer segments and experiences and identify product development opportunities and prototypes of digital experiences, according to Gartner.
When guiding clients in selecting UCaaS and/or CCaaS solutions, particularly those that integrate AI, Trusted Advisors should first understand the underlying reasons behind the client’s initiative. It is essential to identify the business needs or drivers that are prompting the consideration of AI. Trusted Advisors must also clarify the desired outcomes or impacts the client hopes to achieve with AI.
Trusted Advisors should ask the client several key questions:
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What problems are they trying to solve?
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What is the biggest area of improvement they are looking to address?
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What are their future plans and goals?
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After implementing a new solution, how do you hope things are different in one year?
By understanding the client’s motivation and desired outcomes and using objective evaluation tools, Trusted Advisors can effectively position AI-powered UCaaS and CCaaS solutions to meet the client’s needs. Additionally, there are tools that can provide unbiased information to compare different AI-enabled UCaaS vendors and solutions.
Opportunity Awaits
If you’re a Trusted Advisor, you’re probably starting to hear chatter that AI takes the budget away from other items like security, data or storage. The reality is that AI can not only drive lower costs of business but also help clients improve their ROI through more efficient operations and a customer experience that matches what end users want.
Trusted Advisors can also help clients realize the power of AI by leveraging the collective expertise and experience they have with others in the channel ecosystem. By using sound strategies to start a dialogue with clients and helping them build a phased approach to AI, Trusted Advisors can capture a market that has only just begun to show its strength.