2023 marked a turning point: the coming of age of Gen AI made enterprises realize the foundational role of data. To maximize AI, enterprises must bring together data residing across disparate applications and repositories, making it available to both commercial AI solutions and internal applications.
Contact center as a service (CCaaS) providers had already started to transition their interaction data into lakes so they could effectively leverage recordings and transcripts. As these vendors expand to manage broader customer journeys spanning multiple systems and departments, they need richer data federation capabilities than traditional integration approaches built for augmenting existing records can provide. Major acquisitions signal this shift, with Twilio’s acquisition of Segment, Genesys’s purchase of Pointillist, and Five9’s Aceyus buys all bolstering the vendors’ data unification plays.
In parallel, enterprises have been assembling data warehouses/lakes and turning to customer data platforms (CDPs). Some have also invested in large repositories for customer surveys, voice of the customer (VoC), and experience data. They are now watching data movements and turning to new approaches such as zero-ETL to minimize replications.
Eventually, enterprises are implementing data governance frameworks to safeguard privacy and confidential data, protect proprietary data assets, ensure accurate and ethical AI outputs, provide transparency into AI decisions, and carefully control data sources to mitigate biases and risks.
These trends converge into foundational considerations for modern CX platforms:
Open interaction data lakes to enable a multivendor ecosystem of AI applications
Rich data models enabling cross-functional data federation and continuous AI learning
Tools to implement data guardrails and enforce governance
Architecture evolution for seamless integration with enterprise data fabrics and architectures
In the vein of the early 2010s modern data stack movement, we are witnessing the emergence of a modern CX stack with data at its core to deliver superior — AI-enabled — customer experiences across the enterprise.
The post was originally published on No Jitter