Five Critical Technologies for a Unified Customer Service Experience

The customer engagement center (CEC) and contact center (CC) have been integrating in silos for decades, with limited sharing of customer interaction channel functionality and data. This has resulted in a fragmented customer experience (CX), according to Gartner, leaving customers to guess which channel will yield the best and fastest answer.

The Gartner Hype Cycle for Customer Service and Support Technologies, 2019 describes the most critical technologies for supporting customers as they seek answers, advice and resolutions to problems, either through a variety of interaction channels or by enabling customer-facing employees to deliver resolution and advice.

“Combining the formerly separate yet closely related Hype Cycle for CRM customer service and customer engagement and Hype Cycle for contact center infrastructure, this new Hype Cycle encourages customer service and support leaders to combine CEC and CC systems to create a broader technology ecosystem“ said Drew Kraus, vice president in Gartner’s Customer Service & Support practice. “In doing so, they can leverage consistent analytics and knowledge tools for gathering, analyzing and sharing critical information and recommendations to both customers and employees.“

Gartner has identified five technologies within the 2019 Hype Cycle that are generating significant interest among customer service and support leaders looking to deliver a holistic and unified CX. They include customer journey analytics, virtual customer assistants, chatbots, conversational user interfaces and knowledge management.