5 Hot Customer Service Technologies

Organizations, the firm concluded, are not doing enough to leverage their maps, or perhaps not using true end-to-end maps.

McGee-Smith sees new cloud-based applications making customer journey mapping more affordable.

In this area, NICE has again taken the lead, according to many analysts. In June, the company launched the NICE Customer Journey Optimization solution, which uses predictive and real-time analytics and machine learning technologies to identify customer behavior patterns and help determine customers' next moves, likeliness to churn, or interest in particular products or offers.

The cloud-based Customer Journey Optimization solution is based on NICE's Customer Engagement Analytics platform. Organizations can use it to personalize the customer experience in real time by deciding which offers or messages to present to customers while interactions are taking place.

"Organizations must be able to connect all the dots in order to see the big picture of how customers interact with them across channels and touch points," said Yochai Rozenblat, president of the NICE Enterprise Group, in a statement. "Customer Journey Optimization helps organizations know where customers have been, what they're trying to achieve, and why specific issues led them down a particular channel.

"Understanding the customer journey is instrumental to improving customer experience and driving brand loyalty," Rozenblat added.

Cognitive Computing

While the nation watched as IBM's Watson beat several champions on TV's Jeopardy!, the real potential of IBM's supercomputer is with high-end customer engagement applications in markets such as financial services, insurance, healthcare, and retail.

As evidence of that, IBM last year unveiled its Watson Engagement Advisor for customer interactions. A key element of this solution is Ask Watson, which lets customers speak directly to the technology through instant message, text message, email, Web chat, or a dedicated app on their mobile phones. IBM's Watson Engagement Advisor provides answers to questions that would otherwise have been fielded by a human operator.

Analysts so far have been very impressed with the Watson Engagement Advisor. Frost & Sullivan awarded IBM its 2013 North American Award for New Product Innovation. Gartner cited Watson in its Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2014, and predicts that by 2017, 10 percent of all computers will be able to learn from past interactions as Watson does.

Deborah Dahl, principal at Conversational Technologies, a speech and language consulting firm, says that Watson, augmented with speech recognition, conversational skills, and application integration capabilities, "will become a central technology in future customer engagement applications."

And Forrester expects Watson and similar systems to become ubiquitous in mainstream business scenarios within the next five years.

Kate Leggett, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, expects to see a sharp increase in "adaptable, self-learning knowledge to contextually inform agents and users for effortless service."

While IBM has garnered much of the attention so far, there's still room for other technology innovations in this burgeoning intelligent virtual agent category, which is expected to grow from $352 million in 2012 to $2.1 billion in 2019, according to Transparency Market Research.

On a smartphone, Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana virtual assistants have clear customer service implications as they answer simple questions on an ever-growing variety of topics.

Another company, IPsoft, is taking cognitive computing to a higher level. The company in late September introduced Amelia, an artificial intelligence platform. Amelia can quickly apply her knowledge to solve queries in a wide range of business processes. She understands the 

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