It's indisputable, of course, that providing customer service at scale depends on the use of up-to-the-minute technology. Consider the example of Nextiva, the Arizona-based communications company. Nextiva supports some 150,000 clients, including marquee companies like Netflix, Allstate and Delta. Technology is so essential to the ability to serve customers at this level that Nextiva, for which I have done some work, designed and built its own customer support platform (NextOS) in-house rather than going to outside vendors for this functionality. However, says Nextiva CMO Yaniv Masjedi, "although we are driven to use the best and most appropriate technology to serve our customers, we take care to avoid a pattern we've seen elsewhere in the tech community of trying to mold or squeeze customer service to fit into whatever's easiest for technology to handle. It has to be the other way around; the customer has to stay in the center."

Nextiva announced the official launch of NextOS, its new platform that utilizes Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning. The new Nextiva platform is an all-in-one communications software, and is being used for three new products: Nextiva Service CRM, Nextiva Chat, and Nextiva Surveys. The products work together with Nextiva Voice, providing what Nextiva calls "true all-in-one communication and holistic insight into the customer journey." NextOS is made to provide a full view of customers across all communications channels, so as to address challenges caused by fragmented communications. Rather than using multiple applications to track all customer communications, the products on the NextOS platform work together through a common user interface.

In the past few years, we've seen a massive change in the information and communication, manufacturing, financial and other industries. Technologies like machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) have taken over the world. Many businesses are working day and night to adopt these advanced technologies because the capabilities of machine learning and artificial intelligence continue to expand and hold the potential for creating growth for businesses. The terms AI and ML are used interchangeably and--because of this--millions of people have a lot of misconceptions regarding these terms. These are highly searched terms on the internet, and are often confused to be the same.

Top business leaders will converge at Talking Stick Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona to share and explore how to Unlock the Customer Experience (CX) Tools of Tomorrow at NextCon. NextCon is hosted by Nextiva one of the leading firms in business communication technology, dedicated to providing a unified customer service experience on the cloud. Tomas Gorny, the innovative CEO of Nextiva recently explained where the industry stands: "As the totality of data grows to unimaginable proportion, business owners need to understand not only what is available, but how to extract the bits and bytes they need to build a useful data set. On the surface, analyzing data appears to be about making more sales. But, the very core of data science is about enhancing customer experience. Data helps businesses provide better answers, build better products, and market goods and services that customers actually want."