Your Call May Be Recorded (and Analyzed by a Bot)

"We can now access customer data that's been previously kind of locked away in call recordings," said Ian Jacobs, vice president research director at Forrester Research Inc., which predicts U.S. businesses will spend roughly $7 billion on contact center systems in 2021. "That means we're going to see a flood of new use cases for that data." Companies don't believe they can ignore the call-center experience they provide, despite millennials' so-called phone phobia and the proliferation of chatbots. Some 89% of companies expect phone communication to continue playing a role in customer care, according to industry publication Customer Contact Week. Verizon Communications Inc. is using technology from Afiniti Ltd. that uses artificial intelligence to connect callers with the agents who are calculated to have the best chance of keeping them loyal.