Art Schoeller

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 […]

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 […]

Find out how Salesforce plans to use the $28B buy to extend the reach of its CRM platform.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]