Art Schoeller
Vice President, Principal Analyst
Author Insights
Blog
Zoom Zooms In On Contact Center, Acquires Five9 To Capitalize On Its Momentum In The Enterprise
Zoom went big and didn’t go home. In the largest acquisition deal in the contact center industry, Zoom announced its intent to acquire Five9 (a cloud contact center provider) for $14.7 billion — a solid move by the most recent tech vendor to have become a verb in our vernacular (Google, Uber, Venmo, etc., being […]
Blog
Microsoft Doubles Down On Healthcare And Conversational AI With $19.7B Purchase Of Nuance
Earlier this week, Microsoft announced its intent to acquire Nuance for $19.7 billion in its second-largest acquisition after LinkedIn. For the past 15 years, Nuance has been the largest independent speech recognition vendor servicing healthcare and enterprise customer service markets. With this acquisition, Microsoft gets serious healthcare chops, an arsenal of conversational AI assets (including […]
Blog
Read This Before Your Next Employee Hits The “Record” Button On An Online Meeting
What do a traveling Canadian Member of Parliament, a cable news legal commentator, and a director of a political organization have in common? They all had to use a meeting app to get their job done in the era of COVID-19 … just like so many of us. Yet as these examples show, with productivity reward […]
Blog
Salesforce Picks Up (The) Slack To Extend CRM’s Reach Into Collaboration But Won’t Dethrone Microsoft Teams
Find out how Salesforce plans to use the $28B buy to extend the reach of its CRM platform.
Blog
FORRward: A Weekly Read For Tech And Marketing Execs
Zoom Forfeits Goodwill By Failing To Secure What It Sells COVID-19 has crippled many companies, but one that surged, at least at first, was Zoom Video Communications, Inc. Zoom’s failure to secure what it sells, however, turns one of the few bright sides of physical distancing into a parable of product security: Releasing a product with shocking security flaws and privacy issues will come back to haunt a company at […]
Blog
You Can’t Ignore GDPR In Customer Service
Many organizations, particularly in North America, think that the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) doesn’t apply to them. On May 25, 2018, the day the GDPR went into effect, I happened to be in Canada doing an in-person workshop with a large financial services client. In a session about contact center trends, I mentioned […]
Video
Moving Your Contact Center To The Cloud: Top Trends Fueling The Market
Transitioning your contact center to the cloud isn’t just for smaller businesses; it can help brands of all sizes boost agility and access to new features. In our new report, “The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Contact Centers, Q3 2018,” we identified the 11 most significant vendors in the space and evaluated them to help you select […]
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Contact Centers Have Moved To Cloud — What’s Next?
As of 2018, the market for contact center technology has fully shifted to cloud. The remaining outliers of demand are large, highly customized implementations that preserve legacy on-premises software or organizations that wish to maintain the technology inside their firewall. Agility, flexibility, and the ability to rapidly shift capacity are all key elements that AD&D […]
Blog
Atlassian And Slack Team Up To Take On Microsoft Teams
Atlassian recently announced a strategic partnership with (and investment in) Slack, which includes the imminent shutdown of Atlassian’s HipChat and Stride products. While it’s mutually beneficial for Slack and Atlassian to join forces against Microsoft, Slack’s acquisition of the Hipchat and Stride IP presents uncertainty for those customers about how and where to migrate next. […]
Video
The Five Use Cases For AI In The Contact Center
Increasing channel diversity and automation will make interactions more complex, requiring highly skilled agents and intelligent processes to assist them. Here’s my take on five valuable use cases for AI in the contact center.
Blog
The Quest For The Holy Grail Of Team Messaging Apps: Finding Your Perfect Solution
We’re seeing a significant challenge today in finding the right enterprise-level team messaging app that’s easy to use, compatible with a work environment, and combines various daily functions so employees don’t have to bounce back and forth between platforms or apps causing confusion. There’s quite a proliferation of team messaging apps in the market, and […]
Blog
Seeing is believing for financial services firms as they increasingly embrace video as a sales and service channel
When we think of obstacles financial services firms need to overcome in order to win, retain, and serve customers, one of the largest ones that come to mind is trust and transparency. For financial services firms these attributes are key to boosting deeper customer engagement with wealth management clients and grow share of wallet in […]
Blog
“Matchmaker, Matchmaker, make me a match…….” Behavioral analytics improves connecting contact center agents to customers
In the Tony Award-winning musical “Fiddler on the Roof,” Tevye, the father of five daughters, bemoaned the erosion of tradition where his daughters wanted to marry for love instead of cultural preservation. The cultural norm was to make use of a matchmaker to seek out mates that satisfied familial desires and goals on both sides. […]