Omnichannel customer experience drives contact center growth

The rising relevance of the cloud in the current business environment is prompting contact center solution providers (CCSPs) to shift from a premise-based legacy infrastructure to hosted/cloud contact centers.

Global, as well as mid-sized CCSPs such as Avaya, Genesys, Verint, NICE, Cisco, Unify, Interactive Intelligence and West Interactive, are strategically offering an omnichannel customer experience to attract business across end-user segments.

Frost & Sullivan finds that the acceleration of omnichannel and digital transformation, coupled with the C-suite demand for stronger and swifter growth, is driving technology acquisitions.

“Hosted/cloud contact center solutions will benefit from converged tools, newer social channels and deeper integrations to expand their footprint from 24% of the total seats base in 2015 to a likely 40% by 2020,” said Nancy Jamison, principal analyst of Frost & Sullivan Digital Transformation.

“CCSPs can drive home the advantage by delivering an omnichannel CX that aligns with the needs of all stakeholders, including employees, customers, prospects, suppliers, distributors and partners.”

Jamison said contact center vendors need to find a way to tap greenfield opportunities while still catering to their large installed base of premise products.

“Vendors that deliver a comprehensive suite of cloud contact center solutions comprising of mobile, social, web real-time communication, analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, automation and personalization technologies, will grow faster than best-of-breed solution providers,” said Jamison.