At the Call and Contact Centre Expo 2025, the primary focus of many sessions was centered around AI, trends, and how to join the never-ending CX competition.

Fola Olafare, Senior Contact Center Delivery Manager at Transport for London, highlighted TFL’s approach to differentiate from the mainstream AI-focused contact space toward a more customer-centric one.

The event, ‘Mind The Gap: How TFL’s CX Strategy is Transforming Customer Experience’, emphasized how organizations can still function in the modern day meaningfully without turning straight to AI for results.

Olafare highlighted what he sees as the current CX trend issue:

“You’ll just see AI laced everywhere – it’s getting to the point of bringing AI for the sake of bringing AI.”

Less AI, More Human

However, with customer loyalty being a valuable currency in the CX space, the customer-centric trend has allowed TFL to thrive, having simplified their customer service approach drastically in the last decade.

By focusing less on AI integration, customer service can continue the traditional approach to drive meaningful human experiences to each individual customer.

He highlighted TFL’s current “Core ethos about listening to our customers and demonstrating that we care.”

Previously, TFL saw frequent barriers between company and customer.

“From a customer point of view it wasn’t great, we had 15 different phone numbers and 35 different emails.

“Maybe 1o, 12 years ago we didn’t have that influence.”

Today, customer’s transportation experiences are leaps and bounds ahead.

He said, “From a contact center point of view, we’ve come a long way representationally,”

“We have a really nuanced support for our visitors – allowing us to provide a dedicated care service for all our customers,

“Telephone is a great starting ground for us – now we have one phone number for customers.”

Customer’s can go to customer support to receive advice on travel planning, how to handle complaints, and discuss transportation issues within their area.

This has also included showing support for customers after negative or traumatizing transportation experiences.

“The aftercare support to the victims of life changing incidents that happen on our networks – providing them that support for a good duration.”

This approach has shown in its results, with 2024 seeing 30 million daily journeys, 9,000 buses, and over 1,400 e bikes around the city, whilst also managing 25% of London’s roads, improving overall transportation for residents and visitors.

In fact, this has prompted the London mayor to set a goal to see more people using public transport, hoping that “by 2041, 80% of customer journeys are being taken by customer transport.”

Automation is Still Key

Despite the focus on human experiences, automation continues to play a role in TFL’s customer experience, utilizing that tool through analyzing real customer experiences to provide its customer’s with a system they actually need.

He said, “We do some much from an automation point of view – we have a lot of strong algorithms working in the background to work out different anomalies.

“We’ve now ensured that intention is available for customers from a journey point of view by enhancing them with our alternative journey messages.” 

And whilst TFL does implement automation in the organization, it recognizes that setbacks will occur with this tool.

“For every automated journey we have, we acknowledge it may not work as well.”

However, in return, “You can have really great conversations for resolving that issue in a really caring way.”

Despite this approach, TFL are conscious about keeping up with customer demands and circumstances.

“We also want to make sure we’re adapting to customer circumstances, to have a really good strong set of customer values – we want to be open and transparent about what we’re doing.

“From a TFL point of view, what excited me is there is so much opportunity to make a lot of people’s lives better in an integrated way.”

At London’s annual Call and Contact Centre Expo, the telecommunications company revealed how its customer-centric approach to limit consumer frustration has improved its overall loyalty.  

This solution is aligned with Vodafone’s strategy to transform customer experience. 

Customer experience results have been improved since the strategy launch in July 2025, with 9 out of 15 of its markets leading with this new strategy, resulting in a six percent reduction in company detraction after the first few months. 

When first researching customer experience strategies, Vodafone discovered that seamless interactions were a high priority for customers, with frequent causes of company detraction relating to negative customer experiences. 

These incidences included: holding for additional agents, transferring calls, repeated conversations, and a company’s failure to keep promises. 

In fact, they had discovered that customers who had experienced at least one bad experience from customer service were 4 times more likely to abandon the company. 

Melda Sofuoglu, Global Senior CX and Service Excellence Senior Manager at Vodafone, explained how the customer expectations have grown since the rise of AI in the CX space:

“We are operating in a rapidly changing industry – expectations have grown to 24/7 service.” 

However, research revealed that as long as customer interactions remained seamless, then customers would be more likely to remain with a company that avoided friction. 

And when companies failed to deliver on results, 46% of customers would research Google to find answers to their issues, driving enterprise intensity to produce better results as customers discover what sets the bar in the CX space. 

Just Ask Once

Vodafone has since researched some of the leading customer services spaces online, including Google and Octopus, to take elements and utilize the most productive strategy for resolving customer complaints. 

The strategy, known as ‘Just Ask Once’, began in 2024 to target pain points in the company’s Albania market, with the aim of resolving a customer issue after just one interaction. 

This strategy utilized generative AI omnichannel service to avoid customers re-explaining issues and call waiting times to resolve queries, whilst also keeping customers in the loop if issues cannot be solved immediately to avoid confusion or miscommunication via text. 

This is also done by deploying Vodafone’s suite of capabilities, such as Super-TOBi, a generative AI assistant that handles complex conversations and queries in comparison to the standatd TOBi chat bot. 

This strategy, however, is not designed to elminate human agents from the mix, but rather to place them at the center of this strategy with chat bots as a second option during traffic spikes, with many of these queries being completed through human agents rather than bots to avoid frustration. 

These bots simply allow agents to complete Vodafone’s vision for setting the new standard for customer experience centered around meaningful interactions and added loyalty, even when mistakes occur. 

This has involved significant investments in human agent training to keep them adapted and involved in the consistently changing state of customer experience, rather than eliminating their positions for AI-only service. 

However, Vodafone has experienced setbacks in this strategy amongst social media responses. 

Aimie Jago, Global Senior CX and Service Excellence Senior Manager at Vodafone, explained how the company are managing the influx from social media:

“In some markets we see some backlash on social media – its more about previous customer experience through chat bots.” 

Resolving past customer interactions remains challenging for Vodafone, arguing that to tackle this previous frustration into returned loyalty they need to experience this new transformation. 

This has affected the company’s ROI after significant investments; however, they are expecting to receive this once business case justification takes place. 

Furthermore, Vodafone’s continues to remain vulnerable, as this strategy depends primarily on technology, investment, and strong sponsorship, due to its small space within the CX space.  

Today, this strategy is being implemented by Vodafone’s global markets, aiming to champion the voice of the customer by creating a strong customer community, available to customers through the Vodafone app. 

Tim Banting doesn’t mince words. “Given that we’ve just had Halloween, I’m introducing the term: Frankenstack,” says the Head of Research at Techtelligence. The definition?

“A horrible cobbled together layering of bots and automation and analytics.”

It’s a vivid metaphor for a very real enterprise challenge. In their race to modernise customer experience, many organisations have piled on AI tools, each solving isolated problems but collectively creating confusion. He explains:

“They’ve hit this wall where adding tech adds cost and complexity and it doesn’t provide any degree of clarity.”

Instead of scaling value, enterprises are scaling frustration.

From AI overload to orchestration clarity: Making CX systems sing

The pendulum, Banting argues, is now swinging back. “What we’re looking at now is this resurgence of journey orchestration,” he says. “It offers a way to make existing systems talk to each other and automate handoffs between these Frankenstack systems.”

He explains that AI excels at optimizing moments within the customer journey, for example, agent assist tools or chatbots handling simple transactions. However orchestration optimizes the full journey.

Banting compares it to a conductor leading an orchestra: “You don’t have the brass section doing their own thing and percussion doing their own thing. It really does require something at the top to help guide it, coordinate it, schedule it and orchestrate that journey.”

Ultimately, the goal should be not more machinery but a smoother flow.

The buying shift: From AI expansion to workflow simplification

Techtelligence’s latest data backs up this trend. “Buyers aren’t hunting for new AI platforms,” Banting confirms. “They’re researching workflow orchestration, data unification, and process simplification.”

This is the latest chapter in 2025’s quietly growing trend – a lean towards ‘cost to serve’ as the key metric for success. Especially as enterprises are under pressure to do more but with a fewer headcount.

When “every customer interaction involves three or four different systems and multiple handoffs, your cost to serve really skyrockets”, Banting says. Automating this process is where orchestration shines, enabling enterprises to increase productivity.

Less tech, more flow

As enterprises consolidate, one message rings clear: the AI arms race is over; orchestration wins the war on complexity.

“There’s no one platform to rule them all,” Banting concludes.

“You really need to do your due diligence and talk about workflow integration with vendors. That will become more important to get the best productivity, both from individuals and also from teams.”

Orchestration is the quiet revolution bringing order to the AI chaos – and the smartest CIOs and CX leaders are already tuning in.

Keep up to date with the latest tech buyer trends

Find Tim’s full analysis on Techtelligence.

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They’re running on static journeys, and disconnected data. Context that should guide the next move gets trapped in silos. Customers end up repeating information to different agents, something more than 70% say businesses need to fix.

Delays are expensive. They make support lines longer, drive costs up, and quietly chip away at loyalty. It’s why real-time customer journey orchestration (RTJO) is moving to the heart of customer experience work. The idea isn’t complicated: watch what’s happening right now, match it with what you already know about the person, and act before the moment slips.

What Real-Time Customer Journey Orchestration Means

“Real-time” gets thrown around often, but in customer service it has a very specific meaning. It isn’t about answering a phone a little faster. It’s about noticing a customer signal the instant it happens, matching it to a live, unified profile, and deciding what to do before the customer has to ask.

Think of a failed card payment. A traditional system might flag it overnight, adding the customer to a recovery email list. Real-time journey orchestration (RTJO) does something very different: it sees the decline, checks recent interactions, weighs account value and risk, and can trigger an SMS with a retry link or route the next contact to an agent who already knows the issue. The action happens while the customer is still engaged.

That ability rests on three pillars:

• Unified identity and context: A customer data platform or connected CRM keeps every click, call and payment tied to one profile, even if the person has shifted from anonymous browsing to an authenticated account.
• Intelligent decisioning: Rules and AI models balance relevance with compliance and cost – choosing whether to push self-service, escalate to a skilled agent, or pause other messaging.
• Omnichannel activation. Whether it’s an email, app push, proactive chat, or direct hand-off to the contact centre, the response must travel through the right channel instantly – with full context for the human who picks it up.

For service teams, the change is dramatic. They’re no longer scrambling after a problem has exploded. They can spot it as it happens, adjust, and solve it while the chance to keep a customer happy, and avoid another expensive follow-up, is still alive.

Benefits of Real-Time Customer Journey Orchestration

When service teams can read what’s happening in real time and act on it, the rewards show up fast. Real-time customer journey orchestration cuts service costs, protects revenue, and keeps customers from abandoning a brand when frustration peaks.

The clearest way to see the impact is by looking at the “moments” where speed and context matter most. Each represents a chance to either save a relationship or lose it.

Rescue moments: failed payments, abandonments, and stuck self-service

Few situations create friction faster than a transaction failure or a dead-end in self-service. Traditional systems may capture the error but act too late, often following up hours later with an email that the customer ignores. Real-time journey orchestration (RTJO) turns those critical failures into a save opportunity.

When a payment declines, the platform can instantly attempt an alternate payment rail, trigger a push or SMS with a retry link, or, if the customer calls, route them to an agent who already sees the failure and possible fixes. In self-service channels, if a chatbot loop or authentication issue stalls progress, orchestration tools can escalate to a human before the customer abandons the journey.

For instance, HSBC implemented a real-time system, and cut abandonment rates by 48%, reduced average handle time by five minutes per interaction, and lowered transfers by 32%. Supervisors also gained about two extra hours each day thanks to live insights and routing improvements.

Disruption moments: travel changes, outages, and service incidents

Unplanned events like a flight delay, a broadband outage, or a medical service surge can overwhelm service channels if handled slowly. Batch notifications or static IVR menus simply can’t keep up when thousands of customers need help at once.

Real-time journey orchestration lets organizations push clear, timely updates and adapt routing rules as conditions change. Instead of customers flooding phone lines blind, they can get personalized alerts, self-service options, or direct access to specialized support. Some companies even use insights to stop issues before they happen.

IC24, a leading U.K. healthcare provider, once reviewed barely 2 percent of patient interactions by hand. Today, it analyzes every single one through a real-time analytics platform. That shift has meant faster, safer decisions during sudden demand spikes (including the intense waves of COVID) and slimmer IVR paths that get patients to the right care without delay.

Value moments: catching opportunity while it’s live

Some moments aren’t about fixing what’s broken – they’re about recognizing a chance to add value before it slips away. A customer lingering on a premium product page, an account edging toward a usage cap, a family planning a major purchase. These signals fade fast if a brand waits until the next scheduled campaign.

With real-time journey orchestration (RTJO), service and sales teams can react while interest is still warm. Decision engines weigh browsing behavior, account history, and risk markers, then trigger an action that feels helpful rather than pushy.

For example, at Ambuja Neotia, an Indian real-estate group, instant lead scoring and agent-assist tools mean the most engaged prospects go straight to the right rep. Hot-lead conversions jumped from 40% to 80%, doubling the impact of each marketing dollar.

Effort moments: smooth handoffs when automation stalls

Self-service has its limits. Voice systems mishear names, bots loop endlessly, and authentication can fail at the worst possible moment. What drives customers away isn’t automation itself – it’s having to start over once they finally reach a human.

Real-time journey orchestration keeps that from happening. The system watches for friction, then hands the case to a live agent with everything intact: menu selections, transcripts, account context. The customer moves forward instead of back to square one. Employees get guidance, too.

For instance, brokerage Angel One tied all service channels into one platform and gave agents guided workflows in real time. The payoff: first-call resolution climbed by 18–20% and average handle time dropped 30%, even as remote work reshaped its contact centers.

Experience moments: listening live and improving fast

Great service isn’t just about reacting to obvious events. It’s also about spotting friction before it turns into a complaint. Every digital tap, survey response, or call recording is a clue if it can be processed fast enough to drive change.

Real-time journey orchestration (RTJO) gives service leaders that ability. Feedback and behavioral signals flow in as they happen; analytics engines flag patterns; orchestration tools adjust messaging, routing, or self-service flows the same day instead of weeks later.

Example: Spanish bank ABANCA uses live feedback across contact centers and digital channels to spot pain points and act quickly. The approach has fueled higher acquisition conversion and sped up process improvements.

By treating every click and comment as a potential signal and closing the loop immediately, brands move from reactive fixes to continuous improvement. Agents benefit just as much. Broken workflows get fixed quickly instead of forcing customers to call again and again.

Implementing Real-Time Customer Journey Orchestration

Acting in the moment doesn’t happen by chance. It takes planning – linking identity, live events, decisioning, and every service channel into one fast, connected loop. For customer service teams, getting this right means fewer escalations, lower handle times, and a journey that actually feels connected.

The most important thing? The right architecture. Teams need building blocks for:

• Identity and consent. A customer data platform (CDP) or connected CRM becomes the single source of truth. It keeps track of who the customer is — even as they move from anonymous browsing to an authenticated session — while respecting consent rules.
• Event fabric. Systems need a live feed of signals: failed payments, app errors, delivery updates, usage spikes. Standardizing those feeds keeps triggers reliable.
• Rules and AI models decide what should happen next. They balance urgency, relevance, and compliance – for example, suppressing a marketing email while routing a payment failure to an agent.
• Once a decision is made, the action must happen instantly: an SMS, app push, proactive chat, or a fully contextual hand-off to the contact center. Modern CCaaS platforms increasingly build this natively for instance, check out Genesys Cloud’s journey management capabilities and NICE’s orchestration innovations
• The leaders in orchestration keep a close eye on first-contact resolution, transfer rates, abandonment, containment in self-service, and how much effort customers actually spend. They add voice-of-customer sentiment to see whether journeys feel easier.

Building this doesn’t require a massive, years-long overhaul. Many teams start small: tie together identity and event data, launch a few high-impact triggers, and grow once the results prove the value

The Future for Real-Time Customer Journey Orchestration

Real-time orchestration today is mostly about reacting well when something happens. The next wave will go further: predicting and preventing friction before the customer ever feels it.

One driver is agentic AI – systems that don’t just suggest next steps but quietly reshape journeys in the background. These tools will summarize interaction history, recommend compliant responses, and update rules when patterns shift. Instead of waiting for analysts to re-map journeys, the platform itself will fine-tune flows as new behaviors emerge.

Another change is predictive service. By combining journey analytics with machine learning, platforms can spot early signs of trouble – like unusual app activity or network data that hints at a looming outage – and trigger preemptive outreach. Customers might get a helpful notification or an alternative payment option before they even know there’s a risk.

Governance will matter more, too. As orchestration engines start to make proactive decisions in regulated industries such as banking, healthcare, and utilities, companies will need transparent audit trails and clear consent management. Decisioning can’t be a black box when compliance and trust are at stake.

For customer service leaders, this shift means fewer angry calls and lower costs, but it also means new skills: journey scientists who tune models, CX strategists who weigh risk and reward, and operations teams ready to roll out changes fast. The brands that build this muscle now will be ready when orchestration moves from reacting in seconds to preventing problems altogether.

Building an Engine for the Moments That Matter

People make up their minds about a brand in fast, fragile moments – when a payment fails, a call drops, or a service hiccup ruins the day. Real-time customer journey orchestration flips those points of friction into chances to help, keep revenue on the table, and avoid another round of costly support.

The approach is straightforward: stay tuned to live events, understand who they affect, and step in right then, while the moment still matters.

Ready to upgrade journey orchestration? Explore our guide to the power of generative AI in CJO, or discover how to scale safely, with this article on secure, scalable orchestration.

But Sanas is introducing a different kind of innovation – one that operates not in what is said, but in how it sounds.

Sanas is a speech understanding technology company that enables real-time accent translation, noise cancellation, and speech enhancement – and recently announced a live language translation solution.

Their flagship accent translation capability works at the flick of a digital switch. An agent’s natural speech is rendered in a different accent, while preserving their words, tone, and identity.

It’s not dubbing, and it’s not voice replacement; it’s an adaptive layer that enhances voice communication, aiming to improve understanding, clarity, and confidence in conversations where accents, background noise, and low-fidelity audio might otherwise be a barrier.

Shawn Zhang, Co-Founder and CTO at Sanas, expanded on this, stating:

“In real time, we modulate the accent and pronunciation from one accent distribution to another depending on the listener.”

What Makes It Different?

What sets Sanas apart isn’t just the underlying technology; it’s the intent behind it.

Most speech-to-text or voice synthesis tools are focused on automation or replication. Sanas, by contrast, sits in the service of human-to-human conversation.

It’s about making people feel heard, not just literally, but experientially.

“Where many solutions try to remove the human from the loop, Sanas keeps the agent front and center, simply adapting how their voice is heard to meet the listener’s expectations or preferences,” added Zhang.

That capability can have striking operational impacts for CX teams: reduced handle time, improved comprehension, and increased agent confidence.

The technology can also be used to help humanize the customer experience and service industry, as Zhang explains:

“Everyone has a unique part of their voice. Accent is a very core piece of everybody’s identity. And it is because of that fact that we find it incredibly disheartening to feel that an accent might prohibit an agent from getting a job and performing in that job.”

For Sanas, This is Personal

The inspiration behind Sanas wasn’t born in a boardroom; it started with a phone call from a friend.

While students at Stanford, the Sanas founders stayed in touch with a former classmate who had returned home to Nicaragua and taken a job in a local contact center.

On paper, he should have excelled. But when they asked how things were going, his answer cut deeper than expected.

“He told us he hated the job,” recalled co-founder Shawn Zhang.

“Not because he wasn’t good at it – he was solving technical problems, resolving customer issues, doing everything right – but callers would constantly complain about the way he sounded.

“It was his accent, not his ability, that they couldn’t get past.”

That moment revealed a painful disconnect: someone with the skills and commitment to help was being undermined by nothing more than how he spoke.

From that frustration came a question: what if technology could help bridge the accent gap without asking the person to change how they naturally speak?

Rethinking the Ethics

The initial reaction many have when hearing about accent translation is one of concern: isn’t this erasure? Doesn’t it imply certain accents are more desirable than others?

These are important questions – and worth asking – but when you look closer, the story becomes more nuanced.

For many agents, especially in outsourced CX environments, accent bias isn’t theoretical; it’s lived.

Harassment, misunderstanding, and dropped calls happen not because of poor language skills, but because of bias or unfamiliarity.

Moreover, outsiders might not realize that without solutions like Sanas’, contact center agents often undergo ‘accent neutralization’ training.

Not only is this costly and time-consuming, but the process of coaching someone to speak differently than their natural intonation strips them of a core aspect of their identity.

“We want to make sure that this is something that improves both parties in the conversation, right?” says Zhang.

Rather than enforcing conformity, accent translation can be viewed through the lens of accessibility, enabling agents to speak naturally and customers to understand easily.

Zhang built on this:

“Obviously, for the listener, they’re able to understand more easily, just because these are pronunciations that they’re a little bit more familiar with hearing.

“For the contact center agent, they’re having a much smoother experience because they don’t have to repeat themselves.”

It is this dual benefit for both customer and agent that Zhang really emphasizes, making conversations better for everyone involved.

How Enterprises Can Implement Accent Translation

As more enterprises look to reduce communication friction and empower their agents, technologies such as accent translation are being implemented.

But where does an enterprise begin when deploying something this transformative? And what must they consider?

For most enterprises, adopting accent translation starts with a clear motivation: to improve clarity, comprehension, and customer satisfaction.

Sanas doesn’t change what agents say. It changes how they are heard.

Through real-time accent conversion layered over natural speech, the software allows agents to communicate in a way that resonates better with their audience, without replacing their voice or identity.

Key Considerations for Deployment

Cultural and Agent Sensitivity

Implementing accent translation isn’t about enforcing uniformity; it’s about offering choice.

Zhang explained that enterprises must prioritize transparency and agent agency when introducing the tool.

Unlike tools that sideline the human, Sanas prioritizes the agent first, shaping how their voice is received so it resonates with the customer.

The key message to contact centers? Bring agents on the journey.

For Zhang, focusing on employee satisfaction is an essential component of this.

“You have to ask your agents what they think about the accent translation service? Is this something that you guys are enjoying?

“Can you tell the difference between your day-to-day job and operations now?”

This dialogue ensures that the employee experience is given just as much credence as the customer experience.

Integration and Infrastructure

Sanas is designed to be easy to deploy, but pre-implementation operational questions may remain: does your current voice infrastructure support real-time routing? Will it sit alongside existing agent-assist tools? How does it integrate with quality monitoring?

Zhang acknowledged this:

“I know that integration is a big friction point [in the contact center space], and I know enterprises assume that there are a lot of steps that come with integrating a new product into their own platform.

“The beauty of Sanas is that we built our algorithm as a virtual microphone.”

Zhang emphasized that implementation doesn’t require complex change management: Sanas scales quickly across contact centers, runs securely on-device, and integrates with virtually any CRM or platform.

From there, “Sanas is in the middle to empower those conversations. It’s very easy for IT to implement.”

Measuring Impact

Like any CX initiative, what gets measured matters.

Beyond anecdotal feedback, enterprises should track contact center KPIs such as average handle time, CSAT, and agent engagement.

Understanding both the quantitative and qualitative impact is key to long-term success.

Zhang said:

“You want to look at these business KPIs: have customer satisfaction scores increased? What has been the response from our customer base? And how does this translate in terms of average handling times?”

Looking Ahead

As voice AI and speech understanding continue to mature, Sanas represents a subtle yet powerful shift: one that doesn’t automate the human out of the conversation, but instead enables understanding.

For enterprises ready to embrace that shift, the road forward begins not just with implementation but with intention.

By prioritizing agent agency, measuring meaningful outcomes, and recognizing accent translation as a tool for accessibility, organizations can create more inclusive, compelling customer experiences.

Some often asked questions include, ‘Do customers really want it?’ and ‘What does it actually mean for enterprises?’

Despite these questions, AI has undoubtedly become one of the most transformative technologies out there, especially in the world of CX.

From conversational AI to generative AI to agentic AI, the technology has a growing presence across the CX landscape—whether in CCaaS, UCaaS, contact centers, or CRMs.

Yet, the path to successful AI adoption is often fraught with complexities, from navigating vendor hype to aligning the technology with unique business needs.

As a global IT service and CX solutions provider, Miratech provides expert guidance to organizations looking to integrate AI meaningfully into their operations. The company’s vendor-agnostic, tailored approach ensures AI implementations address real-world challenges to deliver tangible business results.

“Whether it’s reducing operating costs, streamlining customer interactions, or transitioning from on-premises systems, Miratech’s end-to-end services are designed to simplify the adoption process and maximize value,” according to Matthew Ainsworth, Chief Revenue Officer at Miratech.

By focusing on seamless integration, advanced analytics, and lifecycle optimization, the company helps enterprises unlock AI’s transformative power while navigating the realities of its implementation.

Tackling Key Challenges in AI Adoption

Unpacking the vendor landscape is an important step in discovering what AI can do for enterprises. Getting this analysis right should reflect on what a business really needs, cutting through the saturation of the AI market and the huge volume of vendors, contact centers, ITSMs, CRMs, and cloud providers starting to step into each other’s territory.

Still today, a significant portion of large enterprises are left wondering what AI really means for them. Ainsworth stressed that “everybody hasn’t even moved to the cloud at this point.”

“The reality is that the CCaaS industry has moved very quickly. There was a big uptake and spike in small companies where there was a positive, easy, quick solution for them.”

“It is widely accepted that this suited their needs and requirements at the time, leading to a large uptake in rolling CCaaS out to these companies. However, the rollout of AI is now at an interesting and more challenging crossroads for larger enterprises.”

Ainsworth noted that larger enterprises have more nuanced needs and requirements. “They’re [larger enterprises] questioning, do I get everything I need from that one vendor like I used to, or am I now looking at my cloud service provider to fill the gaps.”

This is where the likes of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft hope to capitalize.

Ainsworth feels that combining all these considerations “has become a lot more complex,” and Miratech aims to ease these constraints and ultimately increase the rollout of cloud-native, integrated AI solutions.

Bridging the Knowledge Gap and Reducing the Fear Factor

Market saturation and hype isn’t the only challenge facing enterprises looking to implement AI.

Knowledge gaps leave room for fear to creep into decision-makers’ minds, especially regarding ROI, use cases, and security.

To combat this, Miratech assists enterprises in understanding AI’s real-world applications, demystifying the complexities of AI technologies.

“As this transition is happening rapidly, AI adoption can be difficult for enterprises to consume and understand where they should go.”

“One of the biggest questions enterprises are asking is whether they can rely on one vendor to do everything, as they have done historically?”

Ainsworth suspects that people realize that “they’re often going to have to use multi-vendor approaches” to address these problems – which means the importance of vendor-agnostic guidance and strong integration capabilities are key to be able to take full advantage of AI’s potential.

Encouraging Uptake Through Real-World Solutions

A recent example of Miratech achieving real results through the implementation of AI saw the company partner with a leading global healthcare organization. Transforming their CX strategy and integrating new AI capabilities improved the organization’s customer journeys – significantly improving the containment rate and scaling the number of AI bots able to handle personalized calls.

Interested in learning more about Miratech? Check out their website.

The company helps enterprises make their customer experience journeys more seamless and personalized, helping to foster customer loyalty and business growth.

Key features of Miratech’s end-to-end CX solutions include designing, building, integrating and managing cloud-based CX ecosystems – with an independent, vendor-agnostic approach that puts the client first.

The company takes a holistic approach to CX, and Matthew Ainsworth, Chief Revenue Officer at Miratech, explained, “We’ve spent the last five years truly focusing on large-scale enterprises in industries like financial services, healthcare, and telecom, driving and building next-gen CX across their contact centers and cloud ecosystems.”

Miratech helps organizations elevate their CX strategies by focusing on technology integration, customer journey mapping, and agile cloud transformation.

On implementation and integration, Miratech helps organizations deploy advanced CX technologies, such as AI bots, CRM systems, and omnichannel platforms, to improve efficiency and customer satisfaction – and to really take advantage of the latest developments.

“Our expertise lies in creating a cohesive ecosystem that integrates, automates, and operates well across the entire customer lifecycle,” added Ainsworth.

Common Themes of Discontent Can be Resolved: Miratech Explains How

Miratech’s CX services are designed to address common challenges in complex enterprise environments such as high operating costs, low customer satisfaction, and the integration of AI – all without losing the human touch.

By leveraging Miratech’s expertise, enterprises can create a CX ecosystem that aligns closely with their strategic goals and meets the unique demands of their customers.

“Our engineering prowess enables us to take a systematic approach to help companies solve problems, addressing their real business needs and continuously improving their CX.”

How to Be a Differentiator? Miratech Leans On Extensive History

Miratech is a company with a long history, having been established over 35 years ago. Ainsworth explained that Miratech has grown from a software engineering and IT outsourcing company to a true CX expert, having built core product features for many of the leading CX vendor platforms.

“Over the last five years, we have really built on our CX expertise and helped many large, multinationals in managing their complex CX ecosystems.

“Miratech looks at managed services from a true cloud perspective and thinks about it across the entire lifecycle.”

“This is true from the initial platform architecture and design, through to building and delivering the CX transformation, and then the actual day-to-day proactive management and optimization of the wider ecosystem.”

“Once an enterprise has their systems continuously integrated and talking to each other, they can truly improve their CX.”

Ainsworth detailed how contact center and CX technology is rapidly developing at an unprecedented rate but that, for him, just implementing the technology isn’t enough – it must be optimized and adapted based on how people will actually use it.

These core principles were discussed in a recent CX Today YouTube video. You can catch up on these insights below:

Two Intrinsic Topics Continue to Dominate CX Conversations

From a Miratech perspective, two topics dominate conversations in the CX sphere: migration from on-prem to cloud and how AI can really transform what the customer experiences.

According to Ainsworth, Miratech has spent significant time partnering to help organizations transition from legacy systems to advanced CX platforms – which is still a challenge for many large enterprises.

He said, “Our approach to both cloud migrations and CX transformations includes comprehensive analysis, design, and deployment, tailored to meet each client’s unique needs.”

With its vendor-agnostic approach and vast experience delivering true transformation, it is clear that Miratech is positioning itself as a global leader in the CX space.

Eager to find out more about Miratech? Visit their website.

An omnichannel UI, conversational IVR, knowledge base, analytics, journey orchestration, and integrations with 70+ business applications are among the core features.

Talkdesk has partnered with Windstream, the managed communications services provider, as its first channel partner for the solution.

“This partnership aligns with how many SMBs prefer to buy solutions through a single provider like a telco,” noted Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research.

It’s part of Talkdesk’s strategy to segment their offerings: an enterprise platform, a mid-market solution, and now an SMB platform.

As Kerravala suggests, this seems another step for Talkdesk in a broader bid to become a CCaaS vendor for businesses of all sizes.

Yet, in expanding into the SMB space with Express, Talkdesk hits upon an often underserved segment of the contact center space.

After all, most CCaaS platforms are broad, targeting enterprise buyers.

Some providers do focus on the mid-market. But, once that first big contract comes in, their focus often switches to chasing more.

Given this trend, Talkdesk can open up its addressable market, a strategy with which its CCaaS rival UJET has enjoyed success throughout 2024.

Consider the adjacent CRM arena, too. There, HubSpot continues to thrive with its SMB directive.

Talkdesk: A CCaaS Provider for Businesses of All Sizes

The official launch of Talkdesk Express came during an analyst event last week, where the vendor also launched Talkdesk Embedded.

Like Express, Embedded aspires to open Talkdesk up to a new market segment.

Indeed, the solution targets system integrators (SIs), empowering them to drop core capabilities from Talkdesk into other applications, like CRM.

Moreover, Embedded may allow Talkdesk to expand further into the organizations it works with. As Kerravala explained:

It’s designed for ease of use. It’s not a heavy lift to integrate. The goal is to get subscribers onto the platform, even if they’re not traditional contact center agents.

“Many employees, especially those outside contact centers, prefer working in the tools they already use,” continued Kerravala. “Embedding Talkdesk into these applications eliminates the need to switch between tools, which enhances usability.”

Earlier this year, Talkdesk also announced a GenAI suite for on-premise service operations: Ascend Connect. With this, the vendor serves another type of contact center buyer, one that it may also – over time – extend its business with.

Yet, as it expands its routes into the market, Talkdesk will prioritize six specific industries: financial services, healthcare, retail, government, transportation, and hospitality.

In doing so, the CCaaS stalwart finds its focus.

As it targets these industries, Talkdesk considers key applications for each sector – like Epic and Cerner for healthcare or point-of-sale systems for retail – and partners with industry leaders.

From there, it considers the processes that flit between these apps and offers preconfigured industry workflows to help customers connect their CX ecosystems.

That’s a big differentiator for Talkdesk, and it will look to flaunt this as it broadens its presence at major industry events like HIMSS for healthcare.

During these events, the vendor will ensure it has relevant announcements geared toward reinforcing its industry expertise.

“This focused approach is smart for a vendor like Talkdesk,” summarized Kerravala. “It enables them to talk to decision-makers about specific challenges, like reducing missed healthcare appointments, which can save providers significant costs.”

Finally, Talkdesk – like its competition – aspires to differentiate with AI. The vendor recently achieved this by being one of the first CX vendors to go live with agentic AI.

Watch on YouTube

CX Today’s Charlie Mitchell introduces a discussion about whether an AI-centric strategy is REALLY the best option in enterprise communications?

For this discussion, he’s joined by two industry experts:

• Dominic McDonald, CEO of ULAP
• Dom Black, Growth Director & Principal Analyst at Cavell

During the video, the enterprise communications experts discuss:

• The trend of tech vendors using the term “AI” in their product descriptions reducing their customers’ “purchase intentions”
• Why brands may wish to take a non-AI-centric approach to enterprise communications
• The verticals in which this conversation is most prevalent
• What is ULAP doing to support businesses taking a non-AI-centric approach?

To find out more about ULAP’s enterprise communications solutions, visit ULAP.

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You can also join the conversation on our X and LinkedIn pages.

With this funding, UJET plans to further its development of generative AI (GenAI) technologies for the midmarket contact center.

Founding CEO Anand Janefalkar will lead the effort, scaling the vendor’s product and engineering efforts to facilitate the next stage of its growth.

Meanwhile, former UJET COO Vasili Triant will step into the co-CEO role to bolster UJET’s overall operations, which will involve accelerating its channel distribution and strategic alliances.

UJET is well positioned within the CCaaS space to use GenAI as the accelerator. After all, thanks to its close relationship with Google, the vendor enjoys unique access to the cloud giant’s AI teams and resources, with the two brands partnering closely together on joint innovation for the contact center and customer experience markets.

With this AI muscle, Janefalkar aims to support contact centers in moving beyond GenAI experiments and chatbot replacement initiatives to make long-lasting, “leapfrog” CX improvements.

“Human-sounding conversations alone are no longer sufficient, as people now regularly communicate via chat or voice conversations overlaid with rich media,” said Janefalkar.

“With generative AI, we can transform these conversations into high bandwidth visual and contextual interactions – the same way we all interact with friends and family – while offering fluid transitions between virtual and human agents, depending on complexity, urgency, and empathetic themes.”

Many other CCaaS companies will claim to be cooking up similar innovations. Yet, in addition to Google AI, UJET has differentiators in how it can support AI deployments.

UJET: Differentiative In Its AI Approach

Most vendors fixate on features when engaging with CCaaS buyers. But UJET changes the conversation. It asks: what outcome do you want for your customers?

By taking this outcome-oriented approach, UJET steers clear of marketing jargon and encourages its clients to think about the customer journey, friction points, and critical engagement drivers.

As the new Co-CEO Triant previously told CX Today: “What we’re doing at UJET is changing that conversation and then bringing in technology that’s adaptable to those outcomes.

“We’ve developed unique capabilities in our platform that don’t exist elsewhere, enabling both agents and customers to interact more naturally and effectively.”

Perhaps the best example of that uniqueness is in the design of the UJET Contact Center Platform itself. Indeed, it has a mobile-centric architecture, enabling cross-channel contact center experiences where customers and agents can exchange text, images, and audio messages.

Now, with those different channels and modalities, add AI into the mix and contact centers can orchestrate customer experiences that seamlessly blend live and virtual agents. That vision is exciting and has perhaps unsurprisingly caught the imagination of investors.

UJET: Differentiative In the Midmarket

Across many enterprise tech subsets, providers typically split into two camps. The first serves large enterprises with all-encompassing suites. The second offers cost-efficient point solutions to SMBs.

That often leaves midmarket businesses with a tough decision: shall we overpay for the suite or spend significant resources piecing together point solutions?

Some vendors will reach out to the midmarket. But, after securing their first couple of enterprise contracts, they’ll likely start chasing more, and – over time – their positioning often changes entirely.

Recognizing and fighting back against this trend, HubSpot has surged in CRM. Now, UJET is doing the same in CCaaS.

Moreover, as Baker Johnson, CMO of UJET, previously told CX Today:

“Our maturing platform and AI capabilities make us extremely appealing and competitive in the midmarket, which is burdened by bolt-ons, point solutions, and cumulative costs.”

Finally, it’s critical to note that UJET is a long-time CCaaS player. It’s not warming up with the midmarket for an enterprise play down the road. Instead, it understands the space and what it takes to deliver a seamless CCaaS deployment.

UJET: Differentiative In Its Channel Strategy

CCaaS vendors often overpromise and underdeliver. That’s one reason many customers are switching providers, a trend bookmarked by Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research.

“With the conclusion of many three- or four-year COVID contracts, companies are reassessing their vendors,” he said on his YouTube channel.

To avoid losing customers, providers must establish close relationships with their channel partners, set the correct expectations, and lay the foundation for trusting partnerships.

That’s why UJET aims to distance itself from the stretched channel partner strategies common in CCaaS, which have become scattered in their messaging and priorities.

Instead, it has fixated on building tight partnerships with three US-based juggernaut Technology Service Distributors (TSD): Avant, Telarus, & Intelisys.

While this strategy is in its initial phases, UJET claims it’s carrying significant momentum and helping it maximize the impact of its available resources.

UJET: Disruptive In Its CCaaS Proposition

The CCaaS market is increasingly competitive, with several new entrants.

Yet, UJET has taken significant strides to increase its allure. Last year, it recorded over a 40 percent growth rate, far above the average in an industry where many competitors are battling to sustain current business levels.

In part, UJET’s success is because of the branding boost it has enjoyed through its Google relationship and positive word-of-mouth (just look at G2).

However, it’s also a result of the unique approach UJET has taken to develop CCaaS technologies, work with underserved market segments, and establish fruitful channel partnerships.

To learn more about UJET and its CCaaS platform, visit UJET.