Takeaways from Talkdesk’s OpenTalk 2018

Earlier this week, I attended OpenTalk — Talkdesk’s annual user event in San Francisco. The event featured the company’s first analyst summit, providing analysts such as myself an opportunity to learn more about the company’s product capabilities, announcements, and future roadmap. I had the opportunity to have discussions with various Talkdesk executives, customers, prospects and partners. This article summarizes my takeaways from those discussions.

My Opentalk experience started with the analyst summit, opened by the company CEO, Tiago Paiva. Paiva shared how the company he founded through a hackathon in Portugal rapidly grew to 1,400+ customers, including firms such as IBM, Bayer, Peet’s Coffee, and OpenTable. Specifically, he highlighted the company’s rapid growth in the enterprise contact center market over the past year. Talkdesk defines the enterprise market as firms with more than 50 seats in their contact center.

Talkdesk currently has more than 200 engineers on staff, which Paiva noted that the company aims to grow by more than four-times over the next two years — a reflection of their continued focus on enriching the platform with new features to keep up with the rapidly evolving expectations of contact center leaders.  To this point, while contact center leaders continuously explore ways they can improve customer experiences, fundamental elements of service delivery remain the same. Specifically, customers expect to be able to interact with a business when they need support. Even if a contact center is using the latest technologies, customer needs can not be met if the contact center can’t handle customer traffic at times of peak demand such as an extreme weather event or a drug recall. As such, Talkdesk announcing its 100% uptime SLA commitment to its enterprise clients is a step towards acknowledging the importance of uninterrupted service in influencing customer experiences.

Also, at the event, Talkdesk announced its new AI capability, IQ, which enables contact centers to utilize machine learning, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics to augment agent intelligence. It provides agents with contextual recommendations — optimizing customer routing to connect the right customer with the right agent, and help align self-service activities (delivered through various tools such as web self-service, chat bots and IVR) to evolve with rapidly changing customer preferences. Overall, IQ can be considered as a similar approach to that of Salesforce’s Einstein capability through which Salesforce infused AI throughout its product portfolio. Along with IQ, Talkdesk introduced six new capabilities to its platform. These include:

• Mobile: This capability enables agents to access a mobile-optimized version of the agent desktop, so they can do their work through mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets. This is important as companies realize restricting service delivery to employees working in offices is restrictive, and that (with certain exceptions) employees can do the same level of work remotely as they would in the office. At the event, I interacted with several contact center leaders noting this ability as a vital factor in maximizing agent utilization rates, and minimizing customer frustration resulting from delayed service.
• Omni-channel: This is arguably one of the most overused words in the customer experience market. There are various definitions of the term, but at Aberdeen, we use it to refer to companies delivering consistent and personalized interactions across all channels. Our research shows that, on average, businesses use at least eight different channels to interact with customers. It’s imperative to deliver a truly seamless experience across all these channels so firms can minimize the risk of frustrating clients with conflicting messages and become a trusted partner that keeps in-tune with the journey their customers take with the business. Through this capability, Talkdesk enables its users to interact with customers through channels beyond phone. Those channels include live chat, mobile applications, SMS, email, social media and in-app messaging. The company also announced its social listening, chat bot builder, and reporting capabilities — the latter of which enables tracking performance across all channels.
• Self-service: Aberdeen’s Self-Service: Create Happy Customers & Reduce Costs study shows that 40% of contact centers currently have a self-service program in place, and another 27% plan to establish one in 2018 and beyond. More companies are incorporating self-service within their activities and looking to optimize it because that’s what their customers want. Modern buyers expect to be able to address their needs themselves, if they choose to do so. A caution for contact center leaders however, is that some customer issues warrant more than what self-service can provide. While simple issues such as checking an account balance, refreshing a cable TV signal or resetting a password can be handled through self-service to minimize customer effort, more complex issues such discussing details of an insurance claim should be handled through agent-assisted service to minimize unnecessary customer effort. At OpenTalk, Talkdesk announced its self-service SDK, enabling firms to build a visual IVR capability by clicking and dragging icons on its IVR builder, rather than coding. This enables contact centers to more easily build IVR flows and enables updating those flows if and when needed to better address client needs.
• Customer journey studio: This capability enables contact center leaders to visually design customer routing flows. Similar to the self-service SDK, the ability to visually design routing flows through clicks enables contact centers to minimize the need for IT resources to build routing flows, and update them regularly as needed. This is closely linked with omni-channel, as the ability to maintain the context of a customer interaction through routing is vital to ensure the consistency and personalization of client conversations.
• Analytics: The company announced three tools for its analytics capability, including Live, which enables building customizable dashboards needed to monitor contact center performance. At the event, we were able to see a demo of the tool, and it seems to make building and updating a dashboard quite simple — they can be customized through dragging relevant reports, relocating their placement, etc. Other analytical capabilities announced include Benchmark and Explore. The former enables contact centers to benchmark their performance against peers in the same industry, companies with similar number of agents, etc. The latter enables root-cause analysis to reveal hidden factors influencing key performance indicators (KPIs). This is especially important in maximizing the benefits from the other capabilities listed above. For example, without determining the root-cause of why customers using self-service for a certain issue are unsatisfied, the contact center can’t fix the issue to minimize the risk of losing customers.

Aberdeen’s The Intelligent Contact Center: Use Data to Drive Efficiency & Maximize Customer Experiences study shows that many of the above capabilities are deployed more widely by Best-in-Class firms, compared to All Others. In fact, Table 1 below provides an overview of adoption rates by top-performing contact centers.

Table 1: Best-in-Class Contact Centers Have a Rich Technology Toolbox

An illustrative list of contact center technology providers related to the capabilities noted in this article is as follows (in alphabetical order): 8X8, Aspect, Five9, Genesys, NICE / inContact, Talkdesk and Verint.

Are you a contact center solution provider? Schedule a sector review now to learn how Aberdeen can pinpoint organizations — and key influencers in those firms — researching how to deliver top-notch customer experiences through their contact center. We’ll discuss how buyers evaluate solution providers, and how they rank your business across key criteria they use to make purchase decisions.