Ahead of DTX + UCX Manchester 2026, Rodney Hassard, Head of Product, Applications at Vonage, shares what the company will be showcasing at UCX and reflects on the key challenges shaping the unified communications and contact centre landscape. As organisations move away from siloed systems and towards AI-enabled platforms, he explains how Vonage is helping businesses streamline operations and deliver more seamless customer interactions.
1. Can you tell me about Vonage’s participation at UCX this year?
RH: We’re really excited to be at UCX Manchester on 29-30 April with a prominent booth right on the front row at stand F24. We’ll be showcasing our latest contact centre innovations with live demos of Intelligent Workspace and our Salesforce Voice integration. It’s a fantastic opportunity to show attendees how we’re transforming the agent experience – making it simpler, smarter, and more intuitive for contact centre teams to deliver exceptional customer service.
2. Are you launching any new products or promoting anything specific at UCX?
RH: We’ll be showcasing two key solutions: Vonage Contact Center Intelligent Workspace and Vonage Premier for Salesforce Voice. Intelligent Workspace is particularly relevant for this audience because of its CRM-agnostic approach. It works seamlessly with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, ServiceNow, Zendesk, and virtually any CRM system.
For organisations deeply invested in Salesforce, we’ll demonstrate how Vonage Premier for Salesforce Voice delivers the number-one rated experience on the AppExchange. Both solutions surface customer context, AI guidance, and real-time intelligence directly within the agent environment, eliminating the need to toggle between disconnected systems.
3. Can you tell me about your customers and how Vonage supports them?
RH: Our contact center customers include organisations like Siemens, which uses our platform to drive customer service excellence globally, Goosehead Insurance, which enhanced engagement with our AI capabilities, and Morrison Water Services, which relies on our Salesforce integration.
What draws customers to Vonage is our deep CRM integration – we’re the number-one rated Salesforce Voice partner on the Salesforce AppExchange – combined with carrier-grade infrastructure supporting 125+ languages, native Microsoft Teams integration, advanced security and compliance, the scalability to add or reduce licenses as they grow, and remote work capabilities enabling agents to work from anywhere.
4. What challenges in particular does Vonage solve?
RH: The most pervasive challenge we solve is operational complexity from siloed systems. Organisations struggle with fragmented unified communications (UC) and contact centre (CC) platforms where agents constantly toggle between multiple disconnected screens, which directly impacts productivity and customer experience.
Intelligent Workspace consolidates voice, video, chat, email, WhatsApp, and more, into a single AI-powered interface with real-time transcription, sentiment analysis through Conversation Analyzer, and intelligent virtual assistants.
What’s particularly powerful is that it works across multiple CRMs – organizations using Salesforce for sales, ServiceNow for IT, and Zendesk for support can deliver consistent agent experiences without forcing every team onto one platform.
5. What are the key trends shaping your industry and how will they play out over the next year?
RH: Three major trends: First, agentic AI – autonomous agents handling routine inquiries with measurable ROI, shifting from voice transport to intelligent conversation orchestration. Second, the trust imperative – with just three seconds of audio creating 85% voice matches for deepfakes, and 84% of U.S. businesses impacted by identity fraud, network powered identity verification is becoming essential. Third, platform convergence – organisations are unifying CC and UC capabilities as single-vendor cloud solutions to ease administration while nearly 40% of enterprises still migrate from legacy PBX systems.
