Moving Customer Awareness to Adoption in 2026
Throughout my decades-long career as a contact center (CC) analyst, I have consistently observed a significant gap between industry experts, technology providers, and customers in their adoption and understanding of emerging technologies. Analysts, members of the press, and technology vendors frequently anticipate and embrace new developments two to five years before there is a groundswell of customer awareness and adoption.
The Role of Messaging in Technology Adoption
Emerging concepts are often introduced to the market to achieve competitive differentiation. This is evident in companies’ marketing efforts around the launch of new products and services, as well as in analyst firms’ claims of thought leadership. Effective messaging is essential for vendors to stand out amid market noise.
Additionally, it serves a critical function for end users, providing the knowledge necessary to improve customer service delivery, strengthen competitive advantage, and make informed budgetary decisions.
Impact of New Nomenclature on Industry Progress
The promotion and adoption of new terminology benefit the entire industry, from vendors to customers. As language evolves, it can reshape perspectives and operational strategies. For example, the shift from “multichannel” to “omnichannel” transformed service delivery from a siloed approach to one focused on seamless customer experiences. Similarly, workforce management (WFM) concepts expanded to workforce optimization (WFO), reflecting a greater emphasis on holistic improvement and heightened functionality.
A nomenclature change that has dominated the contact center space is the consolidation of terms under the umbrella of AI, including machine learning and speech technologies. The rapid maturation of AI over the past decade prompted contact center vendors to highlight its integration across their product offerings and to extend it into their core adjacency—unified communication and collaboration (UCC). This AI trend accelerated as additional terms emerged, reflecting advances in technology and sophistication. Examples include conversational AI (CAI), generative AI, agentic AI, and artificial general intelligence (AGI), among others.
The blending of CC/UCC also highlighted the need to improve both customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX). This hastened internal development of new products and the integration of solutions and third-party applications into business operations, either natively, through APIs, or from communications-platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) offerings.
A Confusing Landscape for Customers
All this change has created varied industry messaging to customers and quite a confusing landscape of options. Does a customer migrate to an all-in-one contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) platform or a CPaaS platform that orchestrates multi-vendor and application usage? Now that traditional CRM suppliers have greatly expanded offerings into the CC realm, does a customer stay with them for broader CX needs or have applications from that provider integrated into a CCaaS platform?
How does a technology provider turn vision into reality for end users and get a clear message broadcast in a changing environment? How do we move companies from spreadsheets to WFM/WFO, and from siloed applications to seamless CX; supercharge self-service; and judiciously add AI to improve CX and EX across the broader business environment?
Translating Industry Vision into Practical Reality
The evolution of industry language and technology is ultimately validated by demonstrating customer use cases that deliver clear, measurable returns on investment, including revenue, employee satisfaction, and customer satisfaction. These examples not only highlight the practical benefits of emerging solutions but also drive further awareness and adoption among customers.
These use cases must reduce customer effort, be relevant to customers’ business issues, and deliver a quick time-to-value. Numerous legacy CCaaS providers have made inroads into addressing this complexity through templates and prebuilt workflows, CPaaS offerings, or fully featured, customizable, tailored, vertical-market-packaged solutions.
Ultimately, messaging does matter. In subsequent columns, I will examine industry solutions and customer use cases that translate industry vision into practice, and how technology providers are helping customers evolve their typically diverse operational environments, which have shifted over time from homegrown, on-premises-based systems to CCaaS and CPaaS. I will also detail interviews with customers on how messaging has informed operational and budgetary decisions.
Nancy Jamison is founder and principal analyst at Jamison Consulting LLC, bringing more than 40 years of experience in contact centers and customer experience. Her career spans many years each at ROLM, Gartner, Jamison Consulting (1.0), and most recently 13 years at Frost & Sullivan, as senior industry director in ICT with a specialty in the retail sector.