Gartner defines the Contact Center Infrastructure market as equipment, software and services that enable organizations to manage multichannel self-service and assisted service customer interactions holistically from a customer experience and an employee engagement perspective. CCI solutions are dedicated to supporting a single customer enterprise or tenant on each instance of the system, even if that customer or tenant supports multiple contact center operations on that dedicated instance. CCI solutions can be deployed on the customer’s premises or can be hosted and managed in a third-party data center or private cloud.
Workforce engagement management (WEM) software is a collection of technologies that help manage the customer service workforce to ensure a high level of operational performance while elevating employee well-being, discretionary effort and satisfaction. The core capabilities of WEM products include: • Evaluation and improvement • Time management • Metrics and recognition (that is, performance management) • Assistance and task management • Voice of the employee (VoE) feedback • Recruitment and onboarding
Gartner defines contact center as a service (CCaaS) as solutions offering SaaS-based applications that enable customer service departments to manage multichannel customer interactions holistically from both a customer-experience and employee-experience perspective. CCaaS is a key technology platform used to support the customer service experience, whether it be self-service or assisted by customer service representatives. All organizations need to offer customer assistance. The preference is for remote support via voice and digital channels over physical presence in offices and stores, though it is common for organizations to offer multiple options. The ambition is for customers to self-serve assistance, through web portals or chatbots. But it is also recognized that complex issues still need the support of employees. CCaaS technology is instrumental in orchestrating both self- and assisted-service engagement with customers. The technology can also manage the quality of engagement between the customer and the customer service representative, recognizing that premium customer experiences are achieved through premium employee experiences.
Conversation analytics platforms enable service departments to extract insights by processing natural language interactions between customers and the organization. Conversation analytics platforms focus on voice and text interactions, whether postcontact or real-time, by telephone, chatbot, virtual assistant, live chat, messaging, and email channels. Extracting insights from natural language customer interactions is crucial for optimizing customer service. Conversation analytics allows customer service leaders to identify opportunities to improve customer and agent experience. It helps track process improvements, customer sentiment and service department compliance with regulatory and quality assurance guidelines; reduces the cost of agent training; and provides agent assistance to improve productivity.
Gartner defines conversational AI platforms (CAIPs) as platforms primarily used for developing applications simulating human conversation across multiple channels and on a mix of modalities such as text, voice and visual content. CAIPs leverage a composition of AI techniques, including classic natural language processing (NLP), and generative AI (GenAI) and agentic AI architectures. To support the building of conversational applications, CAIPs principally provide low-code and no-code coding options. Application areas include AI assistants and conversational AI agents. Conversational AI platforms are designed to address the increasing demand for organizations to efficiently build, deploy and manage AI-driven conversational systems at scale, addressing the requirements of both employee experience and customer experience use cases. While they may offer some predefined AI assistants or AI agents that can be modified, the primary focus of a CAIP is to equip organizations with tools for building customized conversational AI applications. CAIPs typically embed specialized, dedicated and feature-rich tooling for language-specific NLP and multimodal interactions, as well as conversational flow building and analytics. By offering a unified environment that supports low-code and no-code development — and, in some cases, extends to pro-code and GenAI-assisted options — CAIPs empower technically savvy business users, including citizen developers, to create and orchestrate both customer-facing and internal AI assistants and conversational agents. Unlike AI engineering environments, which primarily serve AI engineers, software developers and data scientists, CAIPs are purpose-built for broad enterprise adoption, enabling strategic, scalable and organizationwide conversational AI initiatives.
Gartner defines customer journey analytics and orchestration (CJA/O) as solutions that track and analyze how customers and prospects interact with an organization across multiple channels over time. These solutions subsequently enable organizations to prioritize and orchestrate real-time improvements to the customer experience in multichannel journeys throughout the end-to-end customer life cycle. The journey lens provided by CJA/O solutions offers insights by combining cross-channel interaction data with transactional, voice of the customer (VoC), and customer profile data on a time axis. Other types of analysis, when used in isolation, cannot achieve this. This enables data-driven predictions at scale and experimentation with multichannel interventions that can be robustly verified as driving increased customer satisfaction, retention, and lifetime value.