Who’s Big in Contact Centre 2018?

It’s safe to say that the contact centre environment is evolving, with new players and solutions entering the market all the time. Today’s contact centre isn’t just a room full of ringing phones; it’s a multi-channel hub dedicated to customer experience, workforce optimisation, and constant analytics and reporting.

We caught up with Chris Marron, the contact centre analysis leader from analytics company MZA, to discuss his thoughts on the vendors that could be driving the pace of change in the contact centre this year. Chris is responsible for creating and publishing reports related to the contact centre environment, and often explores issues like cloud reporting, shipment reviews, and the competitive environment.

Who Has the Market Share in Cloud Right Now?

In Chris’s opinion, the companies with the leading market share in contact centre this year are the big legacy vendors like Avaya, Cisco, and Genesys, followed by other emerging experts like Mitel, Huawei, Enghouse Interactive, Unify, and many others.

“While the challengers like Nice inContact, NewVoiceMedia and Five9 are all making significant strides in the current marketplace, it’s still the big vendors that are leading the way. To put it into context, in 2017 Avaya was doing around 800 million in pure contact centre revenue despite the difficulties of their Chapter 11 process, while Five9, a leader in the CCaaS space, was doing about 200 million.”

While big vendors may be leading the way, smaller challengers like TalkDesk, Five9, and others are still growing at a fantastic rate thanks to their affinity with the cloud. While these challengers were born and raised in a flexible cloud environment, legacy providers have to struggle to overcome the conventional roadblocks that are preventing their evolution.

How Will the Market Change Going Forward?

As cloud providers continue to accelerate, and legacy providers struggle to move at an equally agile pace, it’s difficult to predict what the future will look like for contact centre vendors. Chris told us:

“I think it’s too early predict who could be the top vendors going forward.”

“While there are significant challenges facing legacy providers right now, these companies also have a huge lead, and there’s a lot of catching up that cloud providers need to do to get to a size like Cisco, Avaya, or Genesys. The leaders may have time to alter their approach and stay ahead.”

All the while, new disrupters are entering the marketplace like Zendesk and Salesforce with their CRM-focused contact centres, or Amazon, Google, and Twilio, with their as-a-service offerings and app marketplaces, and finally disruptors from the UC space such as 8×8, RingCentral who recently acquired Dimelo to enhance their CCaaS offering with additional strength in digital channels and Vonage who have announced their intention to acquire CCaaS provider NewVoiceMedia.

“What we can say about the marketplace going forward is that it’s going to get more competitive. We’re seeing a huge amount of evolution in the form of companies like Amazon coming in with an easy-to-integrate cloud platform, and app marketplace.”

“Today, people have more freedom to get involved with the contact centre environment thanks to new technology like APIs.”

Companies everywhere are beginning to redefine and rediscover what the contact centre means and come up with new solutions to support their customers. “We’re seeing new developers coming in to create solutions to particular problems, and other vendors coming in and approaching the contact centre from a new angle. Going forward, we’re going to see the contact centre getting even more competitive, both in terms of CCaaS and on-premises solutions.”

Source: uctoday

Industry: Unified communication news