Executive Summary

Contact Center Advanced

Contact center technology has evolved from its roots in call handling into a more sophisticated suite of interlocking applications that serve a series of enterprise functions. In the process, the market for software available for contact centers has become more complex for buyers to navigate. To effectively evaluate the tools on offer, it is useful to divide the market into two segments: one focusing on products that remain tied to the core functions of the center (especially interaction routing) and a broader category that expands the field to include tools for enterprise customer experience operations.

By dividing the field into “basic” and “advanced” platforms, we acknowledge that while there are some contact centers (and providers) that remain focused on the core, there are many others that have entered the market from adjacent segments like customer relationship management and marketing technology, bringing along features rooted in analytics and data management that are rarely found in traditional contact center platforms.

This evaluation of advanced contact center tools looks at software providers that claim to be able to stand up full-blown contact center operations but do it without selling the core voice and digital routing infrastructure known as automatic call distributor. Thanks to the emergence of commoditized routing platforms and cloud tools, it is now possible for an enterprise to construct a contact center/CX technology stack without starting from the telephony services as a base. In fact, an enterprise can start from any component they consider “core” and build out from there, adding to existing enterprise software or constructing something alongside that tightly integrates with it. Some enterprises consider “core” to be more data-centric or even marketing-centric rather than focusing on telephony or interaction routing. Today’s contact center software providers need to be prepared to address enterprise CX needs. This is why ISG Research expects that by 2028, one-half of the contact centers that replace their core platforms will focus on data tools like CRM or CXM rather than the voice routing engine.

When ISG Research describes a contact center platform as “advanced,” we consider it capable of performing all of the most basic operations, including interaction routing, fundamental agent management and reporting. From there, the toolkit expands outward to include advances that are rapidly becoming table stakes: preserving continuity of a customer’s experience across channels and time; tools for supervisors to monitor, engage and motivate agents on-site or remote; real-time sentiment analysis and customer feedback awareness; and of course, the artificial intelligence and automation applications now finding their way into every nook and cranny in contact centers, from self-service to agent evaluations to knowledge resources.

Contact centers have increasingly transitioned essential digital and telephonic infrastructures from on-premises to cloud-based platforms. This shift has been underway for more than a decade with the assumption among technology suppliers and buyers that the cloud is the deployment method to manage the software and the interactions between agents and customers. However, contact centers in a post-pandemic world need to adopt a hybrid approach that engages an enterprise’s technology where it operates and in whatever way agents and customers interact. As the industry moves from the binary “cloud vs. on-premises” approach into a more realistic, situation-based model, enterprises are exploring hybrid deployments that mix cloud and on-premises applications based on each enterprise’s comfort level.

Contact center providers have adapted product portfolios to support the new reality of cloud computing and operating in public or private cloud environments. The industry has reached a point where contact center in the cloud, referred to commonly as contact center as a service, is the dominant mode of operations for new or expanding contact centers. The market landscape of providers has changed significantly as some technology providers with on-premises offerings have developed, migrated or acquired contact center offerings aimed at the entire marketplace.

To deliver a seamless and consistent customer experience, enterprises must integrate a broad array of communication channels and share available information among agents and the workforce. Contact center systems handling interactions must apply the same rules across every platform to maintain context as customers move from channel to channel. Cloud-based applications largely obviate the need for dedicated technical resources with on-premises products and can be easier, faster and less expensive to deploy.

In our contact center suites research, we find that enterprises that need technology have plenty of opportunities to digitally update the environment. In every significant category, the available tools are well equipped with functionality and more versatile in how they are managed and deployed. New providers have entered the market, sometimes from surprising directions, and more established global suppliers have been spurred to adapt.

However, a diverse array of options means buyers need to do more complex homework to determine their needs and match software providers to those needs. Buying contact center infrastructure is no longer a simple matter of selecting a voice routing engine and letting that choice determine the rest of the application tech stack. That practice, though still common, does not always prepare an enterprise’s contact center for the complex challenges of managing customers across channels over time, nor for integrating operations into the business’s broader efforts to provide a unified customer experience.

Pared down to its essentials, the responsibility of an advanced contact center is to meet customers in the communications environment of their choice and provide whatever information or services match the needs of both parties. In doing that, centers must balance the high cost of maintaining a labor force, an increasingly automated self-service entryway and an escalating use of data sourced from many internal systems. It is important to select software provider products based on criteria that go far beyond the traditional focus on telephony and efficiency.

The fact that service delivery enterprises traditionally move slowly represents an opportunity to leap over several interim technology generations and approach the question of customer service provisioning with a fresh perspective.

Another change that makes this market segment impactful, though more complicated, for buyers is the de-emphasis of the voice channel and, with it, the core automatic call distribution system. The rise of digital channels is well known, and it appears that most interactions today are a mix of voice and digital, including chat, email and SMS. If you consider voice one of many available digital channels, then it is possible to relegate the ACD to a secondary criterion when building a center’s overall infrastructure. While legacy ACD technology providers want buyers to focus on the communications aspect of the contact center, alternatives exist in the form of service-based software platforms that allow you to build your center around a data/analytics toolset or a ticketing and case management system and bolt on the telephony provider of choice through open application programming interfaces.

It is common to evaluate contact center offerings by zeroing in on a tightly defined niche, like the ACD or the self-service front end. We believe that, in an expanding environment, an enterprise needs to start with a broader approach that acknowledges the ongoing changes in contact center technology. To prepare for a rapidly changing future, organizations first need to understand the breadth of what providers offer and narrow the view to the platforms and applications that best map to operations, goals and existing infrastructures.

The most advanced products in the market are characterized by several elements. First, functions in the contact center are efficiently melded with important customer-related functions performed elsewhere in the enterprise, especially in marketing and sales. This unification is increasingly taking place through open platforms sitting on top of routing engines sourced from partners, especially cloud providers.

Second, products are deeply reliant on having a mechanism for consolidating and analyzing data from multiple sources, particularly CRM systems, interaction data from the routing layer and internal knowledge about products, problems, solutions and offers. This leads directly to providers ramping up more complete analytics solutions than traditional contact center key performance indicator tracking.

Third, advanced products tend to incorporate AI and automation features. The difference between “garden variety” AI and what we find in advanced products is that the latter tends to be agnostic to the specific model used, with a deeper breadth of available use cases. Software providers in this evaluation are beginning to focus attention on providing detailed cost and return on investment information tied to particular use cases.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Contact Center Advanced encompasses the foundational tools needed for running centers, along with the additional capabilities needed to unify the center with enterprise CX teams. Our evaluation determined that, within the Advanced category, numerous software providers do not organize the product set around a routing engine. These engines are viewed as a universal utility, available from many point solutions providers or developed in-house by enterprises wishing to go that route.

We examined the offerings of 34 providers that approach the contact center from multiple origin points: legacy contact centers, martech, CRM and workflow automation. Some provide full offerings; others are platforms meant for building or plugging in third-party applications. This evaluation necessarily puts together some companies that do not directly compete or make systems in the same segment. Buyers must go into the examination with the understanding that not all subsets of these providers will fit every situation, and the variety of possible situations is enormous, varying by size, industry, geography and the nature of the enterprise’s customers. How a provider rates in this overall evaluation should be viewed in the context of how it fares within the full scope of contact center suites and individually within the Buyers Guides specific to contact center platforms and agent management tools.

To be included in this Buyers Guide, products must include functional elements of workforce management, quality measurement, agent performance, automation and self-service, data management and analytics and customer feedback management.

This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of advanced contact center technology as we define it: 8x8, Aircall, Alvaria, AWS, Avaya, Cisco, Content Guru, Dialpad, Emplifi, Enghouse Interactive, Evolve IP, Five9, Genesys, GoTo, IntelePeer, Microsoft, Mitel, Nextiva, NICE, Odigo, Ozonetel, RingCentral, Salesforce, Sprinklr, Talkdesk, TCN, Twilio, UJET, USAN, Verint, Vonage, Zendesk, Zoho and Zoom.

Buyers Guide Overview

For over two decades, ISG Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. We have designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirements in any enterprise. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to rating software providers in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an enterprise.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Contact Center Advanced is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for agent management software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. An effective product and customer experience with a provider can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment.

In this Buyers Guide, ISG Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of Capability, we applied the ISG Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for agent management to an enterprise’s requirements.

The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of agent management technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its full performance potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of software providers that does not represent a best fit for your enterprise.

ISG Research believes that an objective review of software providers and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of agent management software and applications. An enterprise’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating agent management systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology.

How To Use This Buyers Guide

Evaluating Software Providers: The Process

We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes.

1. Define the business case and goals.
   Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. 
2. Specify the business needs.
   Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology.
3. Assess the required roles and responsibilities.
   Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. 
4. Outline the project’s critical path.
   What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. 
5. Ascertain the technology approach.
   Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. 
6. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria.
   Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. 
7. Evaluate and select the technology properly.
   Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products.
8. Establish the business initiative team to start the project.
   Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources.

The Findings

All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a software provider are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your enterprise’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software.

Factors beyond features and functions or software provider assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an enterprise may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one provider or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of software providers and products to your specific needs.

Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories

The research finds NICE atop the list, followed by Verint and Genesys. Companies that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. NICE has done so in seven categories; Genesys in five; Salesforce in three; Verint in two and Content Guru, Dialpad, Sprinklr, and Talkdesk in one category.

The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.

The research places software providers into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies providers’ overall weighted performance.

Exemplary: The categorization and placement of software providers in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Content Guru, Dialpad, Emplifi, Five9, Genesys, NICE, RingCentral, Salesforce, Sprinklr, Talkdesk, Verint, Zendesk, Zoho and Zoom.

Innovative: The categorization and placement of software providers in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: Avaya, Cisco and Nextiva.

Assurance: The categorization and placement of software providers in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: 8x8, IntelePeer and Twilio.

Merit: The categorization of software providers in Merit (lower left) represents those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The providers rated Merit are: Aircall, Alvaria, AWS, Enghouse Interactive, Evolve IP, GoTo, Microsoft, Mitel, Odigo, Ozonetel, TCN, UJET, USAN and Vonage.

We warn that close provider placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every enterprise or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how enterprises handle contact center operations, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one software provider’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular enterprise’s needs.

We advise enterprises to assess and evaluate software providers based on organizational requirements and use this research as a supplement to internal evaluation of a provider and products.

Product Experience

The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with an enterprise’s life cycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent an enterprise’s requirements but how the provider operates. As more software providers orient to a complete product experience, evaluations will be more robust.

The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, of the overall rating using the specific underlying weighted category performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Usability (15%), Capability (25%), Reliability (15%), Adaptability (10%) and Manageability (15%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. NICE, Verint and Genesys were designated Product Experience Leaders.

Many enterprises will only evaluate capabilities for workers in IT or administration, but the research identified the criticality of usability (15% weighting) across a broader set of usage personas that should participate in advanced content center.

Customer Experience

The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire life cycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. Technology providers that have chief customer officers are more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring this commitment is made abundantly clear on the website and in the buying process and customer journey.

The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth, using the specific underlying weighted category performance as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are Validation (10%) and TCO/ROI (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research.

The software providers that evaluated the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are NICE, Genesys and Verint. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs. While not a Leader, Content Guru was also found to meet a broad range of enterprise customer experience requirements.

Some software providers we evaluated have/did not have sufficient information available through their website and presentations. While several have customer case studies to promote success, others lack depth in articulating their commitment to customer experience and an enterprise’s advanced contact center journey. As the commitment to a software provider is a continuous investment, the importance of supporting customer experience in a holistic evaluation should be included and not underestimated.

Appendix: Software Provider Inclusion

For inclusion in the ISG Buyers Guide™ for Contact Center Advanced in 2024, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $25 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two countries, and have at least 50 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 18 months.

Advanced Contact Center Platforms, evaluating the core functionality that serves the operating needs of contact centers: interaction routing (voice and digital); workforce management (agent forecasting and scheduling); recording and capture; quality measurement; agent performance; agent desktop; remote workforce; agent experience and feedback; interaction handling analytics; automation and self-service (IVR, knowledge management); and data and integration. For the “advanced” aspects, we evaluated modern additions to the contact center toolkit: AI in quality measurement and self-service; data management systems like CDPs, knowledge management; advanced interaction analytics; customer feedback; and workflow automation.

The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.

All software providers that offer relevant advanced contact center products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.

Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.

Products Evaluated

Providers of Promise

We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”