The overall research objective is to measure the current use and future decision making behavior toward customer contact solutions primarily in the United States with a small sample from other regions. The technologies we covered include: customer journey analytics, elearning, quality monitoring, social media analytics, speech analytics, unified agent desktop, workforce/performance management, web interaction analytics, and web collaboration tools. Interaction channels we explored include: chat/chatbot, email,ivr (interactive voice response), live agent, messaging bot (Facebook, WeChat, etc.), IoT (internet of things), mobile customer care, proactive outbound,video/video kiosk,virtual assistant (text, voice), web, and social media.

We aim to:
Understand the IT-related challenges organizations face today
  • Monitor the status of digital transformation
  • Assess the current and future use of CX technologies
  • Evaluate factors that drive investments in CX technologies
  • Gauge CX trends
  • Appraise available IT budgets

One key finding was that by 2022, over 95% of contact centers will have chatbots deployed. Other big investments will include messaging bots and virtual assistants. AI will allow for automation of more complex tasks, but will not substantially replace humans. On the contrary, live agents will build relationships with customers.

This study provides insights on key investments needed for end user businesses to meet their number one corporate goal: to improve customer experience.