Max Ball

Sunnyvale

Principal Industry Analyst at Forrester Research

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Articles

The Agentic Curmudgeon

1 week ago | smartcustomerservice.com | Max Ball

Walking the vendor floor at Enterprise Connect 2024 was like watching a parade of magic tricks—impressive demonstrations that left me wondering what was happening behind the curtain. Booth after booth proudly displayed agentic artificial intelligence solutions that promised autonomous customer service agents capable of independent reasoning, strategic planning, and adaptive problem-solving. The demos were slick, the marketing materials glossy, and the promises grandiose.
CCaaS Vendors Thrive In A Wild Market

1 month ago | forrester.com | Max Ball |Noel Yuhanna |Dipanjan Chatterjee

This is my second CCaaS Wave. To the uninitiated, the familiar set of vendors in this Wave could make it appear almost as if there has not been much change in this market. Looks can be deceiving. Two years has made a big difference for CCaaS vendors, as Forrester’s newly published The Forrester Wave: Contact Centers as a Service, Q2 2025 reveals. The CCaaS vendors have marched forward through a time of incredible change.
Agentic AI: the Value vs. the Buzz

1 month ago | smartcustomerservice.com | Max Ball

One of the great joys of being an analyst is having the time to look at new buzzy technologies and form opinions on whether they will be useful for contact centers. Then I get to spend time talking to folks about how the technology will make a difference in the contact center. The latest hot new thing is agentic artificial intelligence. This is a real and exciting technology, bringing the ability to act to AI.
Many Exciting New CCaaS Tools Are on the Horizon

Feb 14, 2025 | smartcustomerservice.com | Max Ball

The development environment is the window to companies' software package souls. If you understand how to build applications on a piece of software, you have also learned how it works. Turns out there is no lack of windows to the soul of a contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) system in 2025. As generative artificial intelligence (genAI) and large language models open new opportunities and capabilities for CCaaS systems, the vendors are adding tools to their offerings.
Build The Right Chatbot Business Case

Dec 12, 2024 | forrester.com | Max Ball

Just adding a chatbot on your website or mobile app will not reduce customer service calls. Sometimes as an analyst it is my job to break someone’s heart, like the times when I must tell a customer service team that it is not surprising that their well-designed chatbot is not reducing customer service calls. In fact, it’s doubtful they will ever see the return on the investment they promised their managers.
What’s New In Indian Mobile Banking In 2024?

Oct 8, 2024 | forrester.com | Pushpa Marwal |Amy Bills |Max Ball

In an era, where people have started doing everything on their phone: is your bank’s mobile app evolving at the pace of your customers’ expectations? Our latest Digital Experience Review of Indian mobile banking apps is just out. It reveals a landscape ripe with innovation yet marked by notable gaps in customer experience (CX). In 2024, Forrester reviewed and evaluated 6 key players to identify best practices, their usability, effectiveness, and their customer experience.
Get ready for genAI chatbots: The state of conversational AI

Oct 7, 2024 | forrester.com | Max Ball |Pete Jacques |Alyson Clarke

Talk about change!!! As we approach the two-year anniversary of the announcement of OpenAI’s launch of GPT 3.5, conversational AI has been reinvented to incorporate generative AI (genAI) to take advantage of the many ways this technology can make self-service applications smarter.
Introducing Infrequently Asked Questions

Sep 5, 2024 | smartcustomerservice.com | Max Ball

One of the most troubling statistics I have seen in my less-than-short career is as follows: Forrester Research conducted a poll of buyers of generative artificial intelligence solutions, and 70 percent of them said that when given the same prompt a generative AI solution will give the same answer every time. This is just wrong! The beauty, and one of the challenges of genAI, is that it just talks, and it will give different answers all the time.
Top CRM Trends To Follow As The Fall Conference Season Heats Up

Aug 26, 2024 | forrester.com | Kate Leggett |Max Ball

Its only a couple of weeks away from CRM conference season – Oracle’s Cloud World is in Las Vegas from September 9-12; Salesforce’s Dreamforce is in San Francisco from September 17-19; Hubspot’s Inbound is in Boston from September 18-20 to name a few of the upcoming events. I’m excited to hear about all the new innovations that vendors will be releasing – new AI scenarios, decision tools to help with LLM choice, easier ways to do prompt engineering.
Is genAI falling short? Not in the contact center

Aug 14, 2024 | forrester.com | Max Ball |Rick Parrish |Naomi Marr

Call Summarization and Infrequently Asked Questions bring real value todayThere is so much pushback and hullabaloo these days related to generative AI and how it does not appear to be paying off yet. It hasn’t been two years since the launch of ChatGPT and already people are asking, “what have you done for me lately?” In the contact center, the answer is plenty. There are already two significant use cases where generative AI is making a big difference.