If I could boil down the past decade in the contact center to one word, it would be mercurial. Prone to significant changes, many of them quick and unexpected. In fact, mercurial might be putting it lightly. Turbulent is more like it, frequently subject to the winds of hype and technological change.
Every year — every quarter, at times — it’s something new. Powerful macro-level trends (the rise of Generative AI, most recently, alongside widespread staffing shortages) force strategic redirection. At the micro level, the needs of agents and customers fluctuate daily, requiring highly flexible solutions to make it all work.
Such has been the cycle since Spitch market for AI solutions in the contact center ten years ago. Looking back at some of the core markers of change—and how we built our organization to navigate the resulting turbulence — helps tell the story of how Spitch became what it is today.
It provides a useful snapshot of what’s in store moving forward, too.
This is the third post in our Spitch: 10 Years of Insight blog series. Read the previous post here.
While the sources of turbulence often remain out of direct control, how we structure our organization —our approach to insulating the customer relationship from volatile market conditions — does not.
This approach begins with developing a deep understanding of each customer’s needs. We routinely consult with customers to provide the best and pragmatic balance between innovation and reliability. Then we provide customer success services to implement tailored solutions ourselves, or with our trusted partners, in the spirit of achieving optimal CX and efficiency.
That approach is built on a few important pillars that allow us to navigate customers through different cycles:
Fast-changing environments require fast-moving ideas. But not every idea is destined for implementation; and not every hype cycle requires changes at the platform and product level.
Within Spitch, the process of bringing ideas to the table is democratized across multiple teams. A dedicated Chief Innovation Officer regularly presents new ideas, for example, that are then scrutinized by stakeholders from Product, Sales, and other teams. We put the ideas that come from these and other teams, like Research and Development, through the same rigor.
At the same time, teams on the product level are constantly gathering knowledge from different customers to improve product cases, UX/UI, and more. These are often the same people conducting pre-sales consulting with our customers.
Across the board, the process is rooted in what we call pragmatic hype adoption. Different teams with different perspectives filter ideas and say, It’s good, it’s exciting, but is it right for our particular customer base?
The Spitch Partner program offers a Partner Portal and special organizations within Spitch that provide constant learning and knowledge transfer. This program is a great opportunity to work closely with our partners on solutions to their most pressing challenges.
Partners receive:
In addition, the Spitch Advisory Board meets every quarter to present and discuss new trends in the contact center. Customers have representation on the Advisory Board, as do Spitch partners and stakeholders.
In the most recent Advisory Board meeting, for example, we discussed:
The topics du jour for our Advisory Board represent just the latest developments in the contact center. Yet Spitch first entered the market during a relative tech boom, in which the pace of change routinely put our approach to the test. Looking back, our responses to four upheavals in particular underscore our commitment to pragmatism.
The arrival of cloud computing meant contact centers had the means to evolve past on-premise infrastructure to cloud-based contact center platforms. This opened the door to new frontiers of scalability, product and application development, and channel expansion. Solutions that might have been difficult to implement were now very much in play.
Our response? To find the right balance between cloud potential and another important consideration: General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and its analog within Switzerland proper. Through our rigorous process for fleshing out ideas, our team quickly determined that this was the most prudent—and lasting—way to move forward in a future dominated by cloud technology.
In our own regional market, we saw a particular hunger for speech recognition, NLU, and NLP for Swiss German dialects. Natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language processing (NLP) might be household names now, but they were relatively new entities in 2014—at least in the Swiss market.
Our technical team understood the implications that speech recognition would have in the contact center. First and foremost, to improve interactive voice recognition (IVR) systems, before evolving to power virtual assistants and self-service. Eventually, we saw the potential for this technology to enable speech-to-text and real-time guidance for service agents.
By 2015, Spitch had developed the first ever automatic speech recognition (ASR) solution (Spitch CodiFy) for Swiss German dialects.
By 2017: the first end-to-end end-to-end omnichannel conversational platform for the contact center.
After 2017, conversational AI in contact centers evolved even further, to which our teams were able to swiftly respond:
In 2023-2024, Spitch launched its internal innovation organizations to better address market change, including ChatGPT and LLM implementation. Customer success emerged as well, as did a new Agent Assistant Suite powered by Generative AI.
This was also the decade that the shift toward multichannel and omnichannel integration picked up speed. With considerable advances in computing power and technology, contact centers could now integrate the additional channels that customers hungered for:
What’s more, end-to-end platforms made it possible to integrate, route, and manage all of these channels. Not coincidentally, this was around the time that Spitch successfully launched its omnichannel conversational AI platform, which included Virtual Assistants (Voice & Text), Speech Analytics, and Voice Biometrics.
Over the years, we have expanded our product suite to include additional offerings such as Agent Assistant, Knowledge Base, and Live Chat. Today all these products are based on Spitch's own engines and powered by Gen AI.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the profound impact of Generative AI on the contact center. I touched on our introduction of Switzerland’s first conversational AI solution. What this did was take a previously entrenched problem—that is, slow-moving, reactive contact center experiences that people and agents generally disliked—and introduce rapid improvements.
Adopted the right way—and our customers’ adoption was measured and pragmatic, to be sure — AI quickens time to value in contact centers in ways previously impossible. For example:
Because Spitch began with a “pragmatic adoption” strategy for AI, we’ve been able to iterate in lockstep with these new developments. Today, that latest iteration involves the use of generative AI and RAG, which only stands to deepen the quality of 24/7 service availability, instant responses, and personalized communication at scale.
With respect to RAG, we’re able to leverage advanced language models and extensive knowledge bases to further enhance conversational AI. Interactions are far more natural and engaging as a result, each one based on the latest, most contextually relevant information.
Over the past ten years spent working in the contact center space, one thing remains constant: people. Now more than ever, people must be the focus of nearly any initiative, however complex the technology we employ to execute it.
Yes, nearly every contact center now relies on AI, which welcomes people from the very first ring tone, executes queries or support agents in real time, and then concludes the overall efficiency and improvement paces. But it’s still people that this AI is built to serve.
And there’s still plenty of work to be done. Those people require protection from the risks of AI (see EU AI Act). They need their contact centers to learn to use these technologies with even greater efficacy. Even today, 62% of transitions between customer service channels are high effort. It takes just a few bad experiences for 39% of customers to walk away from a company or product—even if they love it.
In terms of orchestrating a contact center experience capable of meeting these demands, leaders must now shift their focus beyond operational cost alone:
The good news is that we have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to building viable contact center solutions in support of our many people. The challenge is finding the people-minded vendors capable of bringing these solutions to market the right way — vendors with a track record of successfully navigating turbulence in the contact center.
