Gartner defines the CRM customer engagement center (CEC) as a cohesive set of software built around core case management tools, dedicated to providing customer service and support by engaging with customers, and intelligently orchestrating the processes, data, systems, and resources of an organization.
Conversational marketing is a customer-centric approach that leverages real-time, personalized interactions between companies and customers and mimics human dialogue for the vendor at scale. These technologies employ AI chatbots and automation to design session-based, cross-channel exchanges in the form of natural language dialogue, using a blend of text and audio. Unlike traditional marketing methods that often rely on one-way communication, conversational marketing employs session-based two-way dialogues which foster meaningful relationships and enhance the customer journey and experience. Conversations occur across various channels — primarily live chat, SMS, email and voice. Integrations across the revenue tech stack facilitate personalized interactions. Conversational marketing strategy is used by digital marketers as well as sales and customer service teams to improve engagement, increase conversion and increase seller capacity.
Gartner defines a customer service knowledge management system as a collection of technologies that enable the timely provision of accurate, contextually relevant, personalized information to an organization’s customers and customer service and support employees. The purpose of a customer service knowledge management system (CS-KMS) is to serve as a single trustworthy source of information that ensures uniform and accurate knowledge is made available to users. Organizations use these systems to improve customer service, provide timely and accurate information to customers seeking self-service support, and support internal customer service agents. CS-KMS platforms or tools are used to replace traditional knowledge bases; manage content; and power conversational AI, chatbots and AI agents. They address business problems such as inconsistent service levels and information across channels, difficulty for users or agents to find needed information, and the manual burden of keeping knowledge content updated and complete. CS-KMS platforms or tools help organizations achieve several positive outcomes. They can enhance service consistency and improve client interactions, as well as improve operational efficiency. By providing easily accessible and consistent information, these systems aim to improve quality and consistency of search results, support the efficient onboarding of new employees, and generally lead to a better customer experience (CX). AI-powered CS-KMS features enable automation, like generating knowledge articles from call interactions, and allow for more advanced applications such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to deliver context-specific answers from proprietary data.
Digital customer service and support can be thought of as any service interaction that starts from a screen. This market consists of applications that enable customer service and support to engage customers through their preferred digital channels, managing persistent dialogues. Digital first solutions treat those dialogues as the atomic unit of interaction, rather than defining it as a channel contact (e.g., an email or a call). This allows for channels and modalities (like voice, text or gestures) to become attributes of an interaction that can be flexibly and seamlessly used as appropriate. These vendors are broadening their offerings, which is bringing them into direct competition with adjacent markets. The most significant collisions are with the CCaaS and CEC spaces.
Gartner defines the enterprise conversational AI platform market as the market for software platforms used to build, orchestrate and maintain multiple use cases and modalities of conversational automation. The enterprise conversational AI platform consists of: A capability layer providing runtime capabilities that include: Natural language understanding (NLU), Dialogue management, Channel integration, Back-end integration, Access control for platform users, Life cycle management; A tooling layer geared toward business users that includes: A no-code environment for building and maintaining applications, Analytic tools for understanding dialogue flows, NLU intent and entity tuning tools, A/B flow testing tools.
Lead generation software automates the process of attracting, capture and distribution of lead data. It sits on the top of the sales funnel, pulling leads from various online channels like email, social media, and landing pages etc. The software offers features that can create personalized interactive content, such as landing pages, chatbots, or surveys, facilitating active engagement with leads. It narrows down sales team’s focus to the customers who are most likely to buy a product or service. Typically, lead generation software is integrated with other platforms to eliminate the need to constantly switch browsers. It is highly advantageous for sales team as it minimizes time wasted on cold leads, and helps to develop a stronger customer base.
The social customer service market comprises applications that support social media as a component of an overall customer service strategy. Gartner classifies an application provider as a social customer service vendor if it supports customer service in one or two specific types of function: External communities: Often referred to as peer-to-peer communities, this software enables customers and partners to blog, post, rate products/services and construct ideas, as well as support peer interactions and offer incentives for loyalty. Social media engagement: Going beyond just monitoring social media for brand mentions, these applications are capable of responding to constituents on popular social networks and have case management.
All unified communications (UC) solutions are intended principally to improve user productivity and enhance business processes that relate to communications and collaboration. Gartner defines UC solutions — equipment, software and services — as offerings that facilitate the use of multiple enterprise communications methods to achieve those aims. UC solutions integrate communications channels (media), networks and systems, as well as IT business applications, and, in some cases, consumer applications and devices. UC offers the ability to significantly improve how individuals, groups and companies interact and perform. The UC solutions that enterprises deploy range from stand-alone suites from single vendors, to integrated applications and platforms from multiple vendors. UC is often deployed to extend and add functionality to established communications investments.