Executive Summary

Contact Center Basic

The market for contact center technology is changing to accommodate a broader set of functions and a wider range of software providers offering novel ways of deploying and configuring the tools. Even though many people refer to this market as “CCaaS,” or contact center as a service, the reality is that more than half of seats worldwide are still thought to be on premises. For many buyers, the software provider decision rests on the fundamental call-routing engine—the ACD or automated call distributor—that connects the center to telephony networks.

Historically, centers would select an ACD provider and configure the surrounding and supporting software tools around that ACD decision. Advanced platforms do not necessarily require the ACD to be central to the decision, and many providers offer contact center capabilities that rely on partners to supply the ACD. Because of this split between providers with and without ACD functionality, ISG Research has chosen to evaluate the two sets of provider tools separately. This Buyers Guide evaluates what we consider a “basic” configuration in which the provider directly delivers the ACD and the routing software that supports it. This fundamental configuration is the most common in legacy centers. It differs from the alternative mode (which we are calling “advanced”) in that it focuses on the routing and essential capabilities needed to maintain a traditional contact center with voice and some digital interaction handling. It is notable that a basic ACD configuration can be either on premises or cloud based; having a basic system does not mean it is not a cloud-based offering. It can be.

The bifurcation of the market is a recognition that different kinds of businesses run different kinds of contact centers, and those centers increasingly handle different kinds of customers and interactions. A basic configuration is sufficient to equip an enterprise with the tools to triage incoming interaction volume across key channels like voice, chat and email. It provides tools for scheduling agents based on projected volume and for assessing the performance of those agents against essential benchmarks. Many buyers will find the basic capabilities adequate for their needs. Many of the providers that supply centers with a basic scenario are also capable of upgrading buyers to a more advanced configuration down the road, one that maximizes advanced developments in artificial intelligence (AI), data management, different kinds of analytics and other functions that are more in the realm of “enterprise customer experience” than pure contact center operations. That distinction—between running a contact center as an independent, isolated entity and running it as part of an enterprise CX project—is one of the most important elements in weighing whether a basic configuration is appropriate.

Contact centers have increasingly transitioned essential digital and telephonic infrastructures from on-premises to cloud-based platforms. ISG Research predicts that by 2027, the distinction between on-premises and cloud-based provisioning of contact center resources will be a peripheral concern for most enterprises.

This shift has been underway for more than a decade, with the assumption among technology providers and buyers that the cloud is the best deployment method to manage 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 with it. As the industry moves away 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.

The role of a contact center is to respond to, answer or escalate every request for service or information that an enterprise’s customers generate. This has long forced centers to operate in a defensive stance, usually in a reactive position, subject to variations in customer demand. It is also largely seen as a cost burden for businesses, although that view is beginning to change as people learn how to maximize centers for revenue and other organizational goals. The focus on cost control is still the main driver of operations, which encourages buyers to adopt a conservative, risk-averse approach to technology assessments. More often than not, when new technology appears on the scene, there is a delay of several years before industry practitioners are comfortable enough with the cost, benefits and capabilities to deploy it. Even then, contact center buyers are generally wary of disruption because centers are seen as mission-critical operations.

The slow pace of the transition from on-premises-based systems to cloud platforms is an example of that wariness in action. Some providers have spent a decade or more slowly migrating installed bases to the cloud while continuing to serve existing on-premises customers. The situation has been costly to some legacy providers as newer competitors pick off clients. This drawn-out transition period has allowed newer, cloud-native providers to stake out significant market positions while being liberated from the constraints of having to develop and maintain multiple platforms.

The heart of a contact center platform is the ACD, a software engine that moves voice interactions from the public network to an agent based on many varied criteria. ACDs used to be the pinnacle of business telecom systems: high-volume, high-velocity switches that were extremely expensive compared to the common business alternative, the private branch exchange. This is no longer true. ACDs have become software applications, reducing the development and purchase costs. This has allowed other parts of the contact center stack to emerge as potential differentiators between providers. Most important today is the ability to handle digital interactions across contact channels, including voice, chat, SMS, different kinds of messaging and, increasingly, video.

The contact center market is now divided into four camps: legacy, on-premises providers that have migrated some or all platforms to the cloud; legacy cloud providers that focus on voice routing; newer cloud providers that are more agnostic about the channels delivered; and providers from outside the contact center space that entered the market with either platforms for developing contact center applications or broad interdepartmental suites that integrate contact center tools into those used by sales, marketing and back offices.

The diversity of providers makes it difficult to continue to use “CCaaS” to describe the market. Usually, it is shorthand for cloud-based centers, but the breadth of providers offering tools in this space renders that term incomplete at best. While the industry discusses what comes after CCaaS, or beyond CCaaS, or even what CCaaS really means, the underlying transition marches on: contact centers are becoming hybrid entities that handle voice as one of many digital channels.

Going forward, we expect that contact center technology will differentiate on factors like the availability of application programming interfaces to connect more dispersed tools, ease of integration and administration, and the ability to automate more processes across the customer life cycle. This evaluation pays special attention to these factors, as well as to how providers have readied operational software tools for more advanced use cases involving analytics, AI and automation.

Technology providers that did well in this research are characterized by several features, including:

• Openness, through APIs and an ease of integration into software ecosystems that go well beyond contact center operations. This is a recognition that, going forward, centers must be more tightly connected to enterprise activities, success metrics and data resources.
• Broadness of vision, meaning attention to as many interlocking components of the stack as possible. If the core offering is a minimal platform designed to encourage application development for key functions, the product is effectively incomplete for most buyers.
• Experience in contact centers. For all the changes in technology, a contact center toolset has to be reliable, market-tested and able to manage the high-volume, mission-critical interaction handling needs of a typical midsized center. Some providers are relatively new to the space and have yet to demonstrate complete awareness of the needs of those buyers.

For basic contact center platforms, our research found that success is often correlated with a provider’s ability to quickly pivot and redirect development resources to new areas. This does not necessarily mean cutting edge; rather, investing in best practices consulting and training is an area that can differentiate a provider in an increasingly confusing and complex marketplace. Providers that articulate benefits and return on investment, describe specific use cases that provide value and help buyers with sensible, non-disruptive transitions to new tools that will prosper in the coming years.

In this Buyers Guide research, we examine the offerings of 30 providers: some cloud-only, some on-premises and some hybrid. The common element among the providers is the centrality of the ACD or call routing engine. This contact center research had specific product evaluation criteria for capabilities that included interaction routing (voice and digital) via an included ACD; interaction volume forecasting and agent scheduling; minimal agent evaluation and tracking tools; a core of necessary dashboards and reporting; interactive voice response and chatbot functionality; and connectivity to a variety of external software applications.

In addition to the core platforms starting with voice and digital interaction routing systems, our research examined issues important to contact center buyers: self-service and related capabilities, including AI, chatbots and intelligent virtual assistants, remote workforce management, migration from on premises to cloud, automation and workflow creation, data and integration capabilities. We also evaluated agent-related applications as part of those platforms, but minimally. An assessment of dedicated agent management provider offerings is available in the Agent Management Buyers Guide, and one of advanced contact center solutions, including those without an ACD, is in our Contact Center Advanced Buyers Guide.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Contact Center Basic evaluates products based on agent desktop; agent experience and feedback; agent performance; automation and self-service (IVR, knowledge management); data and integration; interaction handling analytics; interaction routing (voice and digital); migration path and hybrid deployments; quality measurement; recording and capture; remote workforce; workforce management (agent forecasting and scheduling); and investment. To be included in this Buyers Guide, products must include key components of above, including an ACD (on premises or cloud).

This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of Contact Centers as we define it: 8x8, Aircall, Alvaria, AWS, Avaya, Cisco, Content Guru, Dialpad, Emplifi, Enghouse Interactive, Evolve IP, Five9, Genesys, GoTo, IntelePeer, Microsoft, Mitel, net2phone, Nextiva, NICE, Odigo, Ozonetel, RingCentral, Talkdesk, TCN, Twilio, UJET, USAN, Vonage 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 Basic 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 Genesys and Content Guru. Companies that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. NICE has done so in seven categories; Genesys in six; Content Guru in five; Talkdesk in two; and Dialpad 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: 8x8, Avaya, AWS, Content Guru, Dialpad, Emplifi, Five9, Genesys, NICE, RingCentral, Talkdesk 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: Cisco, Nextiva and Vonage.

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: IntelePeer, Mitel 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, Enghouse Interactive, Evolve IP, GoTo, Microsoft, net2phone, Odigo, Ozonetal, TCN, UJET and USAN.

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 basic contact center technology, 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 (20%), Capability (25%), Reliability (15%), Adaptability (5%) and Manageability (15%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. NICE, Genesys and Content Guru were designated Product Experience Leaders. While not Leaders, Five9 and Talkdesk were also found to meet a broad range of enterprise product experience requirements.

Many enterprises will only evaluate capabilities for workers in IT or administration, but the research identified the criticality of usability (20% weighting) across a broader set of usage personas.

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 Content Guru. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs.

Several software providers we evaluated have sufficient information available through their website and presentations. While many have customer case studies to promote success, a large number lack depth in articulating their commitment to customer experience and an enterprise’s 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 Basic 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 continents, 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 12 months.

Basic Contact Center Platforms, evaluating the core functionality that serves the operating needs of contact centers: agent desktop; agent experience and feedback; agent performance; automation and self-service (IVR, knowledge management); data and integration; interaction handling analytics; interaction routing (voice and digital); migration path and hybrid deployments; quality measurement; recording and capture; remote workforce; workforce management (agent forecasting and scheduling); and investment.

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 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.”