2014 North America Hosted/Cloud Contact Center Buyers Guide

Transcription

1 2014 North America Hosted/Cloud Contact Center Buyers Guide Selecting the Right Cloud Solution Provider for Your Contact Center November 2014

2 Contents Executive Summary... 3 Purpose... 3 Introduction... 3 Market Trends... 3 Movement to Omni-channel Engagement... 3 Proactive Customer Care... 6 Mobility... 7 Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery... 7 Company Profiles... 8 [24] x Aspect Software Bell Canada (BCE) CallMiner CenturyLink Contact Solutions Five Genesys incontact Interactive Intelligence Nexidia Noble Systems Nuance TeleTech Transera West Conclusions Legal Disclaimer The Frost & Sullivan Story

3 Executive Summary Purpose This study is divided into two sections. Section 1 provides analyst commentary on the most important market forces affecting contact center system trends for This is based on extensive primary and secondary research. Given the maturity of the North American market, Frost & Sullivan expects that these trends will extend well into Section 2 highlights the top-performing contact center system providers (as measured specifically by their North America revenues). The purpose is to provide enterprise organizations with a fundamental assessment of these providers and their capabilities in a single report. Each of these companies strives to deliver excellent customer care, and many have unique solutions. Solution providers are listed in alphabetical order. Introduction Frost & Sullivan projects that the hosted/cloud contact center market in North America will have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of % from 2013 to The cloud contact center systems market surpassed the on-premise contact center systems market for the first time in 2013, and is poised to exceed $ billion by the end of Scalability, flexibility, and the ease with which companies can add or try new applications are just a few of the reasons that the hosted market has become so compelling. Many legacy contact center system providers have added hosted and hybrid offerings to their repertoire, adding more choice but also more confusion to the vendor landscape. Market Trends Movement to Omni-channel Engagement The proliferation of channels and devices that consumers now have at their fingertips is creating an operational challenge for all contact centers. Mobile, engaged, and always-on are just some of the terms used to describe today s consumers. While they still call, increasingly their preference is to self-serve first and research online and through their peers before they engage or re-engage with a business. Increasingly, customers in 2014 expect personalized interactions and engagement on the channel of their choice, yet will channel hop moving between voice, text, mobile apps, chat, blogs, streaming video, community forums, and social media often using three or more simultaneously. 3

4 Frost & Sullivan s 2014 Customer Survey: Enterprise Priorities in North America, Multi-channel Customer Contact, surveyed 305 contact center and customer care decision makers as to their future contact center plans. Survey results show that the highest growth is projected for new customer contact channels. The highest growth rate is for social media customer interactions, followed by mobile customer care apps, and Web self-service. Chat and video continued to be growth areas as well. Exhibit 1 provides the North American expected growth rates for customer interaction channels for Exhibit 1: Expected Growth Rates for Customer Interaction Channels, North America, 2014 Note: Size of the sphere represents the growth rate. Source: Frost & Sullivan 4

5 Clearly, multi-channel adoption is on a steep trajectory, driven by the growing use of social and mobile channels. In the process, more traditional channels, such as interactive voice response (IVR), chat, and the Web are getting facelifts. Channel functionality is increasing such that customers can more easily enter and move between channels, and have context and history move with them. Moreover, more information is being integrated through cross-channel analytics. Frost & Sullivan calls this the omni-channel experience. In essence, while new customer interaction channels are accelerating the adoption of multi-channel contact center routing, the contact center industry is moving toward an omni-channel experience in which cross-channel customer engagement including face-to-face interactions at brick-and-mortar locations is seamless. Even so, challenges remain when it comes to true channel integration. Note that one-third of contact center organizations stated that their contact channels are fully integrated, but by 2016, % expect to be fully integrated (a % increase). Exhibit 2 provides the North American current and future integration of contact channels for 2014 and Exhibit 2: Current and Future Integration of Contact Channels, North America, 2014 and 2016 Source: Frost & Sullivan 5

6 These omni-channel aspirations mean that sales and support agents now require a wider set of communication tools: voice, video, , IVR, Web chat, file sharing, and social media. For cloud providers, this has meant speeding up product development to gain parity with legacy contact center system providers product sets. Proactive Customer Care Outbound dialing and telemarketing particularly in the realm of accounts receivable management (ARM) has long characterized the industry. Over the years, however, the outbound dialing segment has had to remake itself to change industry perception and carve out new niches of opportunity and revenue due to government rules and regulations borne out of a consumer backlash against intrusive and annoying calls. This change has triggered developments in proactive customer care, from the integration of inbound and outbound dialing combined with self-service to personalization of contacts and preference management. As a result, proactive customer care has become one of the hottest trends to watch. The Enterprise Priorities in North America, Multi-channel Customer Contact survey reveals that close to two-thirds of US companies expect the volume of proactive customer care interactions to increase over the next two years. More midsize and large contact centers and communications and healthcare companies expect proactive customer care interactions to increase. 6