The Contact Center Is Dead: Long Live the Operations Layer
We have been lying to ourselves since, well, basically since forever. We placed customer support agents into a padded room called the “contact center,” handed them a ticketing system, and told them to keep the angry people away from the rest of the business. We tracked average handle times; we cheered when a routing algorithm saved a fraction of a second; and we pretended that managing an interaction was the same thing as solving a problem. Deflecting an issue was the holy grail. That era is over. The walls of the contact center have been blown wide open, and the debris is currently raining down on the CRM and operations landscapes. The market is shifting from asking the question “who can capture the ticket best?” to “who can actually resolve the problem fastest?” Which is an entirely different category of question. And far more meaningful. And as Cameron Marsh from Nucleus Research so accurately pointed out in our recent CRMKonvo, that is a much nastier, much more complex place to compete. TL;DR If you want to watch the full CRMKonvo, please go ahead here (optimized for smartphones) or here (optimized for tablets/computers). Else, be my guest and continue to read. Or feel free to do both … The Illusion of the “Smart Ticket” Let’s just be absolutely clear from the start: nobody wants a ticket. A ticket is simply a formalized receipt of failure. It is documented proof that a product broke, a service failed, or a user interface was too clunky to navigate. For years, many vendors, including specialists like Zendesk, Freshworks, and others have built success around...
Agentic Commerce: A Genuine Paradigm Shift or Just Another Vendor Pitch?
The e-commerce industry has been pushing the exact same shopping cart down the exact same digital aisle for the better part of two decades. We have endlessly debated the optimal color for a checkout button. We have deployed massive Customer Data Platforms (to track users across the web. We have implemented traditional Customer Relationship Management tools and a full-on MarTech stack to send personalized emails that usually find a direct way into the spam folder. Yes, despite all this expensive digital plumbing, the average conversion rate stubbornly hovers around a meager two percent. Enter the industry’s latest shiny toy: agentic commerce. The vendor pitches are certainly alluring. We are moving away from the tedious “click and wait” era into a frictionless “talk and buy” reality. On the surface, it sounds like a massive leap forward. However, any technology analyst worth a grain of salt must ask the difficult questions. Is this actually revolutionary, or is it just a database update with a new coat of paint? Are we solving a genuine consumer friction point, or is this just a solution looking for a problem to help a vendor’s stock price? TL;DR If you rather want to watch the CRMKonvo, find the mobile optimized version here and the tablet/laptop version here. Or feel free to read on. Or do both. The Death of the Traditional Search Bar Raj Balasundaram, founder and CEO of agentic Commerce vendor Bayezon AI identifies a fundamental shift in consumer behavior. The traditional search engine model is dying. For years, the standard consumer journey has been a repetitive four-step process. You type a query into a...
AI Agents: Finally, a Digital Assistant That Doesn’t Just Sound Smart?
So, the time of agentic AI has come? What does this mean? Not for businesses, but for business users. These days, the main tool in the quiver of every business user in an enterprise is … the web browser. Initially web interfaces to business software and then SaaS software has seen to this. The result? Employees needed to build their workflows around a plethora of different web applications, having open a corresponding number of tabs at any given time. I just counted the ones that I have open: fifty-three. And that doesn’t even count the web browsers that I do not even recognize as such. For example, Apple Calendar, or Microsoft Outlook. Maybe even MS Word … one never knows where there’s a browser these days … Now, with agentic AI moving into the business, these workflows will need to change. How, that heavily depends on the vendors one works with and, of course, the size of the own business. One of the main considerations when moving towards agentic workflows or agent-supported workflows is the orchestration of agents. This becomes especially important when working with different software packages and this is also a core reason for the emergence of protocols like MCP (model context protocol) and A2A (agent to agent) or ACP (Agent Communication Protocol) that are currently developed. Plus, there are a few “agentic” browsers emerging that allow for the orchestration of different agents on the user level. But what is best, what to use – and when? After all, many of the vendors that are already in house, have their own strategies. And many of the buyers,...