CF20: 2023's 20 Top CCaaS Providers You Should Know
NICE, RingCentral and Five9 all made our list. See who else did and why.
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Forrester’s Max Ball cited NICE InContact among top CCaaS providers due to its “strong breadth of function, including workforce optimization (WFO) through CCaaS and more, and strong AI.”
And Jon Arnold said NICE InContact is among noteworthy pure-play providers.
Arnold said Avaya is among noteworthy CCaaS providers and is one to watch. In May, Avaya emerged from chapter 11 bankruptcy with approximately $650 million in liquidity. Company officials said Avaya emerges from bankruptcy focused on advancing innovation with their long-range product road map.
“I was at their analyst event a couple of months ago and they’ve kind of gone all in on contact center,” he said. “So UCaaS is kind of secondary for them. So whatever success they’re going to have down the road, it’s going to be driven by contact center.”
Arnold cited RingCentral among top CCaaS contenders. And 451 Research’s Raul Castanon said it’s one to watch. This month, RingCentral announced the launch of RingCX, a native, intelligent CCaaS solution. RingCX combines RingCentral’s flagship UC (including message, video, phone, SMS and fax) with contact center, plus generative AI capabilities. It delivers a complete native omnichannel experience and transforms customer journeys across various touchpoints.
Arnold said Microsoft is one to watch in CCaaS if it decides to become a direct player. Castanon said Microsoft is among noteworthy providers. And Ball said Microsoft is slowly building out a full CCaaS suite.
“Everybody knows that they’re not a direct player, but if they really wanted it, they would either do their own thing, or they would make a big splash and take out Genesys or somebody else,” Arnold said.
Speaking of Genesys, Ball cited Genesys for its good WFO and strong AI. Castanon said Genesys is one to watch. And Arnold said Genesys is among noteworthy pureplay providers.
In March, Genesys introduced a new way for SMBs to quickly explore and buy a full-featured CCaaS solution. GCXNow allows organizations to build the foundation they need on Genesys Cloud CX to create a personalized, “empathetic” and end-to-end customer experience, the company said. This means across phone, email, chat, text and social channels.
Ball said Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) CCaaS product is not as polished as the other leaders, but the benefits of being AWS are significant and provide value to their customers.
“They’ve invested a lot in trying to amp up what they’re doing,” Arnold said. “They’re not like a major solution for an all-in-one for a big enterprise deployment, but there’s plenty of market out there for them to chase.”
Castanon said Zendesk is one to watch in CCaaS. In November, a group led by global investment firms Permira and Hellman & Friedman completed its acquisition of Zendesk in a $10.2 billion, all-cash deal. The acquisition took the company private.
And in May, the company introduced Zendesk AI, an intelligence layer the company says makes “personalized, efficient and more empathetic” customer experiences accessible for all companies.
Arnold said Google is a noteworthy CCaaS contender with UJET. And Castanon said Google Cloud is one to watch
“Their big finger in the pie with contact center for Google is the Google Cloud Contact Center AI (CCAI) initiative where they partnered with most of the contact center vendors to provide AI for speech recognition and that kind of thing,” Arnold said. “But they also did this kind of sneakish move of going to market with UJET. So UJET is the brand, but it’s really Google. That’s one of these combo things. UJET otherwise wouldn’t be getting much attention, but that’s the partner that Google is working with.”
Ball said Five9 is noteworthy for its “strong commitment to AI and analytics, and a strong offering.” Castanon said it’s one to watch. And Arnold cited Five9 among top providers.
This month, Five9 announced it’s buying Aceyus in a move it says will boost its data integration and analytics capabilities. Specifically, the acquisition will help the company access the contextual data to “optimize, predict and deliver” services for customers. It’s critical for Five9 AI and automation solutions where the use of data aims to accurately and effectively deliver a good customer experience.
Ball said Talkdesk is a top CCaaS provider due to its “modern architecture, breadth of functionality and a commitment to vertical solutions. And Arnold cited Talkdesk among top contenders in CCaaS.
“Not a whole lot has changed from last year in terms of the profile of who’s in the game, and frankly I don’t see that changing in a big way,” Arnold said. “I don’t think anyone’s going to enter this market out of the blue at this point. I just don’t see how they’re going to get traction.”
Ball said Content Guru is a noteworthy provider for its “rock-solid core product, [and] focus on data and AI.” Last month, Content Guru announced the general availability of new features that extend the functionality of Storm Link, its on-demand video-and file-sharing tool. The new features, which include geolocation sharing, rear camera support for video calls, and a greater range of personalization capabilities, have been refined following a period of real-world customer testing. The increased versatility of the product allows organizations in all sectors to augment voice channel experiences.
Arnold said Dialpad is among noteworthy CCaaS providers, and Castanon said it’s one to watch. This month, Dialpad unveiled DialpadGPT, a domain-specific LLM to power features that automate tasks for enterprises regardless of size. Dialpad, an AI-powered customer intelligence platform, built the model using more than five years and five billion minutes of proprietary conversational data.
Ball said Cisco is a noteworthy provider due to its Webex Cloud Contact Center. And Arnold said Webex contact center is a “big deal” for Cisco.
An economic downturn is the biggest factor that has impacted customers’ demands/expectations, Ball said.
“In a recession, you see brands cut their contact center budgets significantly so the pendulum swings from providing the best customer service to ways to cut costs,” he said. “Self-service is one of the most common places to see people cut costs. The interest in self-service has shot up in my inquiries. Prior to the fourth quarter of last year, my inquiries on self-service ran about 5% of my overall interactions with brands. In the fourth quarter, that number jumped up to 14% and its been over 20% since. Layer on top of that the promise of generative AI and the interest in conversational AI is white hot across the industry right now.”
Zoom is one to watch in CCaaS, Castanon said. And Arnold said Zoom is a “real innovation machine.”
“That’s their focus, fail fast, develop fast, try new things,” Arnold said. “And I don’t think anybody really comes close to their pace of doing these things. So they’re really good at doing it themselves rather than doing all the big acquisitions.”
Ball said 8×8 is noteworthy in CCaaS for its “tight integration with their UC platform and voice network.” Castanon said 8×8 is one to watch. And Arnold said 8×8 has native capabilities so “they’re definitely in the game.”
In March, 8×8 launched Supervisor Workspace. It aims to allow organizations to improve contact center performance and drive better customer experiences. It’s a purpose-built experience that blends analytics, performance management, and team administrator capabilities into a single interface. The user interface provides a performance-centric management space for contact center leaders.
Ball said Vonage is a top CCaaS contender due to its tight integration with Salesforce, and a “powerful” UC and CPaaS offering. Arnold also cited Vonage among top providers.
Last month, Vonage Protection Suite launched, aimed at helping developers and businesses create counter-fraud safeguards with end-to-end security. It provides tools that protect the entire Vonage Communications Platform (VCP) portfolio of solutions, including UC, contact center and conversational commerce, as well as the recently launched AI Acceleration Suite.
Arnold said Mitel is among top CCaaS providers. Mitel is in the process of acquiring Unify, the UCC services businesses of the Atos group. Mitel officials said the combined company would have the operational scale, portfolio, geographic reach, go-to-market resources and financial profile to modernize the UC experience for customers faster and more effectively than either company could do alone.
Ball said Twilio is noteworthy due to its tools-based CCaaS offering. And Castanon said Twilio is one to watch.
“Twilio brings us into the CPaaS realm where platforms can do contact center because they can use these CPaaS things to have very customized forms of messaging, and a lot of it’s about outbound notifications to customers,” Arnold said.
Ball said LiveVox is a noteworthy provider based on its focus on “simple to use and build.” This month, LiveVox announced a new partnership with Jenne. The partnership will provide Jenne’s VARs throughout North America with immediate access to the LiveVox platform, enabling their clients to transition away from on-premises contact center solutions, and take advantage of capabilities including AI and automation.
Arnold said Intermedia is among noteworthy providers. In April, Intermedia launched its AI Interaction Summary, its latest solution to incorporate AI technology. Developed for Intermedia’s Intelligent Contact Center, AI Interaction Summary leverages generative AI and LLMs to automatically create an accurate summary of each transcribed contact center call to speed up the close of each call, enable a representative to move to the next call quicker, and provide supervisors with concise call synopses for coaching and training purposes.
Arnold said Intermedia is among noteworthy providers. In April, Intermedia launched its AI Interaction Summary, its latest solution to incorporate AI technology. Developed for Intermedia’s Intelligent Contact Center, AI Interaction Summary leverages generative AI and LLMs to automatically create an accurate summary of each transcribed contact center call to speed up the close of each call, enable a representative to move to the next call quicker, and provide supervisors with concise call synopses for coaching and training purposes.
Contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) providers saw a surge in demand during the COVID-19 lockdown and they continue to benefit from that momentum with an ongoing transition to cloud-based solutions.
This is the result of the flexibility and resiliency that cloud solutions afford, in addition to advanced capabilities such as generative AI, which are typically cloud-based.
This is our fourth annual list focusing on CCaaS providers. Analysts share their views on what it takes to succeed with the technology. It includes an updated list and fresh views on changes in the competitive landscape.
According to Fortune Business Insights, the global CCaaS market should grow from less than $4.9 billion in 2022 to more than $15 billion by 2029 — a compound annual growth rate of 17.5%. The increase in cloud-based CCaaS adoption for global remote working is driving market growth.
Impact of Generative AI on CCaaS Providers
Raul Castanon, senior research analyst at 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, said while unquestionably disruptive, the impact of generative AI for CCaaS is likely more evolutionary than revolutionary, building on previous AI milestones and large language models (LLMs) that businesses have been using for several years.
451 Research’s Raul Castanon
“This gives companies and products like Dialpad, Twilio Flex, Salesforce’s Contact Center, Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI Platform, Microsoft’s Digital Contact Center Platform, Genesys Cloud CX and Zendesk a leg up,” he said. “These companies have a long trajectory with AI and numerous assets they can build upon. For instance, Dialpad acquired TalkIQ back in 2018 and Twilio acquired Segment in 2020.”
Generative AI levels the playing field, enabling players of all types to leverage AI and LLM, Castanon said.
“At the same time, it changes customer expectations, raising the bar for everyone,” he said. “Moving forward, rather than a differentiation, customers will perceive AI-enabled capabilities allowing them to deliver personalized service at scale to be table stakes.”
AI Bringing New Value to CCaaS Providers
Max Ball, principal industry analyst at Forrester, said AI has brought new value in four different areas of CCaaS. Those are:
Customer self-service. AI-driven chatbots and voicebots are in huge demand, and CCaaS leaders all have a strong way to provide this capability. There are still a number of conversational AI vendors who make a difference here as well.
Agent augmentation. AI-driven tools to make suggestions to agents to help them with insights into customer sentiment, suggested next best actions or answers to questions.
Quality management. AI-infused quality management is now provided by many of the leading CCaaS vendors. This allows them to provide better and smarter feedback to agents, and allows them to scale their agent reviews down to very small contact centers.
Analytics. The ability to take recordings of customer conversations and turn those into quantifiable data for reports to help the contact center and the entire organization. Customers tell the contact center exactly what they think of the brand and their products.
When it comes to generative AI, there’s not a lot in production yet, Ball said. Brands are experimenting with agent-facing tasks or internal tasks to improve processes as a low-risk starting point.
Forrester’s Max Ball
“Analytics is another place where we will see traction very quickly,” he said. “Most of the contact center managers I speak with are still trying to understand generative AI and what it will mean for them.”
The conversational AI vendors and the CCaaS providers are aggressively going after generative AI for conversational AI to try and understand how to put guardrails around the technology to make it safe while still offering new capabilities, Ball said.
“LLMs and generative AI hold the promise of bots that will be able to make connections that previously would need to be specifically programmed,” he said. “This opens the door to self-service applications that are far more powerful than what we are used to because it will be much faster and more efficient to build them.”
Cybersecurity Big Priority
Jon Arnold, principal of J Arnold & Associates, said cybersecurity is a big priority among CCaaS providers as contact centers are increasingly being targeted by cybercriminals.
J Arnold & Associates’ Jon Arnold
“The risks that agents face, they themselves can be targets for cybersecurity obviously,” he said. “Somehow customer information gets compromised and someone calls in pretending to be a customer or trying to do some phishing to extract some other personal information from the agent or order history, and all that kind of reverse social engineering. So a big one is how strong is your security perimeter? What are your cybersecurity tools to have advanced threat detection? And again, AI is the big hero because it can detect patterns and anomalies faster than humans and can flag them. And you can almost even set up fake responses that are basically like a honeypot. It kind of lures the fraudster into thinking they’re pulling something off, and then you can circle around and get them. Also, because fraudsters know they’re being tracked, they will subtly change a couple of words here and there so it looks like it’s a distinct attempt. But again, the AI can have enough intelligence to detect those minor changes and still say no, it still fits the pattern.”
Under Pressure to Make Money
CCaaS providers are all under a lot of pressure to make money, and that’s another change from last year as a lot of companies went through layoffs to right-size, Arnold said.
“And some of them have made some exits from the premises-based side of things,” he said. “I don’t think economic headwinds will affect their M&A plans so much. But if the economy gets tighter and tighter, and interest rates stay high, then the role of customer service will get much more important when people are being very careful about where they spend their money and the brands that they want to trust.”
We’ve compiled a list, in no particular order, of 20 top CCaaS providers in the slideshow above. It’s based on analysts’ feedback and recent news reports. This is by no means a complete list and includes a broad spectrum of providers in the contact center space.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email Edward Gately or connect with him on LinkedIn. |
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