The CF List: 20 CCaaS Providers You Should Know
Cloud-based contact center is no longer considered a luxury or a future conversation.
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Avaya is among big established players in CCaaS who own the most market share, Arnold said. It’s among providers becoming increasingly cloud-based.
“They still have a lot of installed base on premises-based contact center,” he said. “So their world has been about migrating those legacy customers over to cloud.”
Avaya is an example of how established players can become young and hungry, Telarus’ Brandon Knight said.
“I think even Avaya will admit it took several tries to get the recipe right for an enterprise-level cloud contact center that would satisfy the needs of their current premises-based customers,” he said. “So in effect, they had to make some major changes and become an aggressive fighter just to compete in the migration of their own customers. And they did what needed to be done.”
AWS is among CPaaS providers bringing programmable APIs to the contact center, Arnold said.
“Amazon has Connect,” he said. “There are several CPaaS vendors that can bring contact center functionality to the game. They’re not contact center players, but they offer a solution. So they’re getting some forms of traction. It’s not for everybody, but it’s another path to getting into cloud.”
AWS is looking to bring video in a business process embedded across channels, 451 Research’s Sheryl Kingstone said.
Cisco is among big, established players in CCaaS who own the most market share, Arnold said. It’s among providers becoming increasingly cloud-based.
“Customers/end-users overall are more tech savvy and more mobile,” Knight said. “A true omnichannel experience with visibility across all channels is one major component of a cutting-edge provider. The other has to be effective use of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven data mining. How much information can be compiled into actionable data and made quickly available to the agent to expeditiously resolve the customer’s concern.”
Arnold said Five9 is one of the “pure-play contact center cloud guys.” And through its upcoming acquisition of Five9, Zoom is going to emerge as a big CCaaS player.
“These companies have been doing quite well,” he said. “They have a clean slate where they don’t have premises-based contact center migration to deal with, so they’re doing very well for companies that are ready to go all-digital and all-cloud.”
Kingstone said Five9 is “really focusing on more of the complete customer experience.”
Genesys is among the big established players in CCaaS that own the most market share, Arnold said. It’s among providers becoming increasingly cloud-based.
“It’s important to remember that with some of these players, contact center is all they do, like Genesys,” he said. “Whereas with Avaya and Cisco, contact center is one piece of their business; Genesys, for example, is all in. So they have a lot to lose and a lot to gain from these trends.”
Contact center has been mostly voice-and text-based, but video is starting to have more of a play in this environment, Arnold said. He and Kingstone said Glance Networks is among providers noteworthy for this.
“There’s a term called co-browsing,” he said. “When agents are dealing with customers, video is not usually a big part of the mix. But there are lots of cases where contact center interaction isn’t just about solving a problem. Sometimes it’s more of a tech support call. Sometimes it could be more of, how do I use your products, what else do you have that might help me? The interaction can take more of a sales and marketing angle than a customer service angle. These are all use cases where video can add something. Let me see what you’re doing so I’ll flip on my camera, and now I’ve added video to the call. All of a sudden, video elevates the call and now I can help you a lot more. So co-browsing is where you can add video to the call.”
IntelePeer is among providers that are mostly CPaaS players, but offer a cloud contact center capability, Arnold said.
“The big takeaway for me is that with cloud, there’s no one way to do contact center anymore,” he said.
Intercom is among niche players that solve specific problems, Kingstone said. Intercom provides a conversational relationship platform, helping businesses build better customer relationships through personalized, messenger-based experiences.
“Where the future needs to play is more of that business-process automation,” she said. “That’s where we need to improve workflow data. And the underlying data architecture is extremely important because that’s where we’re going to improve the virtual assistant and also improve real-time decisioning for the agent to make sure that they’re the best that they can be in front of a call, and improve self-service. So where the future comes with a lot of these providers isn’t really what they’re offering today, but where they can go with data and business process automation.”
Microsoft has been a noteworthy CCaaS provider. However, it’s now potentially “very vulnerable” in this market because it doesn’t have a native contact center platform, Arnold said. It’s always had partnerships.
“And now with Five9 going to Zoom, it’s going to upset the apple cart for how these partnerships have been working,” he said. “There’s going to be fallout there for sure. That’s because other companies that had previously partnered with Five9, now there’s more of a competitive environment so they have to be very careful.”
Mitel is among the big established players in CCaaS who own the most market share, Arnold said. It’s also among providers becoming increasingly cloud-based. Last month, Mitel launched two new cloud-centric partner programs, Mitel Amplify and Velocity. They offer more choice and flexibility for partners.
Nice inContact is one of the bigger players in CCaaS, Arnold said. In April, Nice inContact announced accelerated international adoption of its CXone cloud contact center platform, tripling sales in the past year and adding a record number of new international customers to the platform. Knight said Nice InContact is noteworthy because of its CXone platform.
Kingstone said CCaaS is an “extremely mature market that is under disruption.”
“It’s a very mature market that has a lot of major providers in it that are now being disrupted by cloud-native providers, digital channel providers, and then where companies are going with things like Amazon Connect,” she said.
Arnold cited NovelVox among smaller companies that have entered the market and are making a run at contact center, taking advantage of accelerating demand for cloud. This month, NovelVox became a Genesys premium partner and introduced performance management software for Genesys contact centers.
RingCentral is among cloud players that aren’t necessarily contact center providers, but have contact center offerings and are cloud-native, Arnold said.
“You’ve had this trend of combining UC and contact center into a single offering,” he said. “So there’s a lot of validation for that market, so those companies have done quite well.”
Arnold cited Sharpen Technologies as another smaller company entering the market and making a run at contact center, taking advantage of accelerating demand for cloud.
Sharpen continued its rapid growth in 2020 with revenue up 100%, while adding more than 40% new customers compared to 2019. During the same period, Sharpen’s platform scaled to handle a 17-times increase in daily traffic volume.
Twilio is among providers that are mostly CPaaS players, but offer a cloud contact center capability, Arnold said. For the second quarter of fiscal 2021, Twilio’s revenue growth continued to accelerate, reaching $670 million and 67% growth.
Knight said while the major players continue to make technology and infrastructure changes to meet ongoing demand in an attempt to stay on top of the pile, “you have upstarts like Ujet that hit the ground running by taking a different approach to the customer experience side of the business.” They’ve also benefitted by being able to check the history of the major players when charting their own path.
Zendesk is among providers that are primarily customer relationship management (CRM) players, but they’re inching closer and closer to doing other things in the contact center market, Arnold said.
“The CRM platform seems to be controlling a lot of the interactions with customers now,” he said. “And digital channels are native to CRM. So that’s how a lot of these channels end up in the contact center, which gives a lot more leverage to the CRM players. So they have more capability to work in this space.”
Zendesk is among providers that are primarily customer relationship management (CRM) players, but they’re inching closer and closer to doing other things in the contact center market, Arnold said.
“The CRM platform seems to be controlling a lot of the interactions with customers now,” he said. “And digital channels are native to CRM. So that’s how a lot of these channels end up in the contact center, which gives a lot more leverage to the CRM players. So they have more capability to work in this space.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has provided more opportunities for contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) companies with remote work prompting skyrocketing demand for cloud-based contact center solutions.
Ditching on-premises and switching to CCaaS has helped call centers keep up with the hybrid workforce and changing customer demands.
The global CCaaS market should reach $10.8 billion by 2028, registering a CAGR of nearly 16% from 2021 to 2028. That’s according to Grand View Research. The need for enhanced customer experience is fueling this anticipated growth.
This is our second annual list focusing on CCaaS providers. Analysts and another CCaaS expert 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.
Pandemic Exposed Contact Center Shortcomings
Jon Arnold is principal of J Arnold & Associates. He said the pandemic exposed a lot of shortcomings in the way many contact centers have been running. That’s because they tend to be very telephony centric. They’re not highly automated and not set up for good forms of self service.
J Arnold & Associates’ Jon Arnold
“A lot of these inquiries that were overwhelming the contact center were pretty routine things,” he said. “And contact centers that were on the ball and adopted forms of automated self-service could handle it. But the ones that weren’t ready for it got completely overwhelmed because now they’re dealing with all these questions that really could have been automated. It forced a lot of them to think about artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud. And this is the CCaaS angle. If you’re using a legacy, premises-based contact center, it’s kind of inflexible. It isn’t scalable and it doesn’t adapt well to short-term changes.”
Pandemic Accelerated Shift to Cloud
Sheryl Kingstone is head of customer experience and commerce, and voice of connected user landscape with 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence.
451 Research’s Sheryl Kingstone
“Back at the beginning of the pandemic, it was a capacity issue,” she said. “So we all sheltered in and the world fell apart. And we had long hold times for contact centers. They were not able to keep up with the demand. And there was not mature adoption across the board of some of these new digital channels. So while some industries were OK because they were already digital and most of it could go through chat, or were already adopting the cloud, a lot of other organizations still struggle to shift.”
These pandemic-related challenges accelerated cloud adoption and CCaaS, Kingstone said.
“And then beyond that, it’s what we are doing to scale these employees, to help them out with things like next-best action and real-time decisioning, and then incorporating that into digital channels for service that really became extremely important over the pandemic,” she said.
No Longer a Luxury
Brandon Knight is Telarus‘ vice president of advanced solutions for contact center. He said the pandemic impacted customers’ contact center needs in two ways.
Telarus’ Brandon Knight
“The biggest short-term impact was the exposure of several companies that had no true business continuity or disaster recovery plan,” he said.
Most companies faced outdated concepts and extremely manual processes that couldn’t be implemented effectively with closed businesses.
“The second-biggest impact was the realization that having a cloud-based versus premises-based contact center is no longer a luxury or future thought conversation,” Knight said. “Prior to the pandemic, the contact center space was dominated by premises-based systems, which didn’t perform as well using remote access or VPNs in comparison to a cloud-based system.”
We’ve compiled a list, in alphabetical order, of 20 top CCaaS providers. It’s based on analysts’ feedback and recent news reports. The list includes a mix of well-known providers as well as lesser-known ones making strides in CCaaS. This is by no means a complete list and includes a broad spectrum of providers in the contact center space.
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