Executive Summary

Contact Centers

In this modern, digital age of customer experience, the journey of engagement across every channel and device must be orchestrated effectively. Organizations, no matter the industry, have inbound and outbound interactions and rely on contact centers to fulfill operational and revenue objectives. The utilization of cloud computing has enabled a new generation of applications and technology that supports this imperative through products that are easier to onboard and utilize than those purchased and installed in the past.

Contact centers have increasingly transitioned their essential digital and telephonic infrastructures from on-premises technology 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 organization’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, organizations are exploring hybrid deployments that mix cloud and on-premises applications based on each organization’s comfort level.

Contact center providers have adapted their product portfolios to support the new reality of cloud computing and operating in public or private cloud environments. After years of sometimes dramatic steps of prioritized development and acquisitions by technology vendors, the focus on cloud development is now well established. The industry has reached a point where contact center in the cloud, referred commonly as Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS), is the dominant mode of operations for new contact centers and for expansions of older ones. The market landscape of providers has changed significantly as technology vendors with on-premises offerings have developed, migrated or acquired contact center offerings that are aimed at the entire marketplace.

Ventana Research’s assessment of the contact center market has found an expanding portfolio of methods to meet the broader need for customer engagement and experiences across channels and interactions and with applications and devices. This demand has introduced investments and communications platforms in the cloud known as Communications Platforms as a Service (CPaaS) that provide more flexibility in configuration and customization than traditional contact center offerings. Simultaneously, this technology has advanced the need for Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) which supports a broader range of what is referred to as digital communications, including collaboration and video. It is now possible for contact centers to adapt and have the ability to support a more streamlined set of interactions for best possible experiences across customer journeys. Technology vendors in the contact center suite market are either directly offering CPaaS and/or UCaaS support through their own technology that is OEM and embedded, or through a third-party partner.

The role of a contact center is to respond to, answer or escalate every request for service or information that an organization’s customers generate. This has long forced centers to operate as a defensive tool for organizations, 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 leverage 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 their 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 costs, benefits and capabilities to deploy it. Even then, contact center buyers are generally wary of disruption because they 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 vendors have spent a decade or more slowly migrating their installed bases to cloud while continuing to serve their existing on-premises customers, a situation that has been costly to some legacy providers as newer competitors pick off their clients. This drawn-out transition period has allowed newer, cloud-native vendors 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 automatic call distributor (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 (PBX). This is no longer true. ACDs have become software applications, reducing their cost to develop and purchase. This has allowed other parts of the contact center stack to emerge as potential differentiators between vendors. Most important now is the ability to handle digital interactions across a variety of 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 vendors that have migrated some or all of their platforms to the cloud; legacy cloud vendors that focus on voice routing; newer cloud vendors that are more agnostic about the channels they deliver; and vendors from outside the contact center space that have 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 vendors makes it difficult to continue to use “CCaaS” to describe the market. Usually, it is shorthand for cloud-based centers, but the breadth of vendors who provide tools in this space render 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.

Making that transition requires attention to activities like analyzing sentiment, improving the information available to agents or automating more of the self-service system. These actions bring contact center planners more deeply into activities more closely associated with their peers who orchestrate marketing campaigns, and with IT teams who integrate the center’s tools with broader enterprise systems.

Going forward, we expect that contact center technology will differentiate on factors like the availability of APIs to connect more dispersed tools, on ease of integration and administration, and on the ability to automate more processes across the customer lifecycle. This evaluation pays special attention to these factors, as well as to the ways in which vendors use modern artificial intelligence (AI) to improve performance across their platforms. Instead of looking at the broad presence of AI within platforms, our research considered specific use cases for AI that are directly relevant to contact center goals like cost control, increased efficiency and better agent awareness.

Technology vendors that did well in this research are characterized by several features:

• 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 mid-sized center. Some vendors are relatively new to the space and have yet to demonstrate complete awareness of the needs of those buyers.

For contact center platforms directly, and separate from dedicated agent management tools, the research found that success often correlated with a vendor’s ability to quickly pivot and redirect development resources to new areas. New areas do not necessarily mean cutting edge; rather, investing in best practices consulting and training is one area that can differentiate a vendor in an increasingly confusing and complex marketplace. Vendors that are able to articulate benefits and ROI, can describe specific use cases that provide value, and can help buyers with sensible, non-disruptive transitions to new tools are the ones that will prosper in the next several years.

In this Buyers Guide research we examine the offerings of 21 vendors: some cloud-only, some on-premises based, and some hybrid; the common element being 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), workforce management, quality measurement, agent desktop, remote workforce and automation and self-service. In addition to the core platforms starting with voice and digital interaction routing systems, our research examined 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, among numerous other issues important to contact center buyers. We also evaluated agent-related applications as part of those platforms, but minimally. An assessment of dedicated agent management vendor offerings is available in the Agent Management Buyers Guide, and one of broad contact center suites, including those without an ACD, is in our Contact Center Suites Buyers Guide.

This research evaluates the following vendors that offer products that address key elements of contact centers and platforms, focusing on the routing engine as the core component, and including a minimum viable set of agent-optimization features: 8x8, Alvaria, AWS, Avaya, Cisco, Content Guru, Dialpad, Emplifi, Enghouse Interactive, Five9, Genesys, LiveVox, Microsoft, Mitel, NICE, RingCentral, Salesforce, Talkdesk, Twilio, Vonage and Zoom.

Buyers Guide Overview

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

This Ventana Research Buyers Guide: Contact Centers is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings will address organizations requirements for contact center software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the RFP process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with technology vendors. An effective product and customer experience with a technology vendor can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment.

In this Buyers Guide, Ventana 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 and Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of capability, we applied the Ventana Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for contact center to an organization’s requirements.

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

To ensure the accuracy of the information we collected, we asked participating vendors to provide product and company information across the seven product and customer experience categories that, taken together, reflect the concerns of a well-crafted RFI. Ventana Research then validated the information, first independently through our database of product information and extensive web-based research, and then in consultation with the vendors. Most selected vendors also participated in a one-on-one session providing an overview and demonstration, after which we requested they provide additional documentation to support any new input.

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

How To Use This Buyers Guide

Evaluating Vendors: The Process

We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing technology vendors for your organization. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from technology vendors on their products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating a 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 technology vendor 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 organization 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 organization’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software.

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

Consolidated Scoring of Vendors Across Categories

The research finds NICE first on the list with Genesys in second place and Content Guru in third. Companies that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Genesys has done so in all of the seven categories; NICE in six; Talkdesk in three; Content Guru in two; and Five9, LiveVox and Emplifi in one category.

The 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 vendors. Those vendors 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 their placement on the vertical axis. In short, vendors that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.

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

Exemplary: The categorization and placement of vendors in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The vendors awarded Exemplary are: Avaya, Content Guru, Emplifi, Genesys, LiveVox, NICE, Salesforce and Talkdesk.

Innovative: The categorization and placement of vendors 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 vendors awarded Innovative are: Cisco, Five9 and RingCentral.

Assurance: The categorization and placement of vendors 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 vendors awarded Assurance are: Alvaria, Microsoft and Mitel.

Merit: The categorization for vendors in Merit (lower left) represent those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The vendors awarded Merit are: 8x8, AWS, Dialpad, Enghouse Interactive, Twilio, Vonage and Zoom.

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

We advise organizations to assess and evaluate vendors based on their requirements and use this research as a reference to their own evaluation of a vendor and products.

Product Experience

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

The research based on the methodology of expertise identified the weighting of Product Experience to 80% or four-fifths of the total evaluation. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Usability (20%), Capability (20%), Reliability (15%), Adaptability (10%) and Manageability (15%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall rankings in this research. NICE, Genesys and Content Guru were designated Product Experience Leaders as a result of their commitment to contact center technology. Vendor rankings for Five9, Talkdesk and LiveVox were found to meet a broader range of enterprise contact center requirements. NICE and Genesys in particular placed higher in Adaptability, Manageability and Reliability with their focus to govern, connect and process product information across the traditional enterprise and cloud computing environments.

Many organizations will only evaluate capabilities for those in IT or administration, but the research identified the criticality of Usability (20% weighting) across a broader set of usage personas that should participate in contact centers.

Customer Experience

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

Our Value Index methodology weights Customer Experience at 20%, or one-fifth, as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the vendor-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 vendors that ranked the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are Genesys, NICE and LiveVox. These category leaders in Customer Experience provided the highest level of information to communicate their commitment. Vendors such as Emplifi, Content Guru, and Talkdesk were not Overall Leaders, but also have a high level of commitment.

There were many vendors that have not made Customer Experience a priority and provided little to no information through their website and presentations for our evaluation. Many have customer case studies but lacked sufficient depth. This makes it increasingly difficult to evaluate vendors on the merits of their commitment to customer success. As a result, many of the vendors did not rank as well in Customer Experience as they did in Product Experience, though it does not mean their products will not provide adequate support. As the commitment to a vendor is a continuous investment, the importance of supporting customer experience in a holistic evaluation should be included and not underestimated.

Appendix: Vendor Inclusion

For inclusion in the Ventana Research Contact Center Buyers Guide for 2023, a vendor must be in good standing financially and ethically, at least $50 million in USD or equivalent for contact center platform vendors; or at least $20 million for vendors of exclusively agent management systems. The firm must operate across at least two countries and have at least 50 customers.

This research is one of three Buyers Guides covering the overall market and two underlying market segments.

To qualify for inclusion in the evaluation of contact center routing technology, a vendor’s offering must include:

• Interaction routing (voice and digital)
• Workforce management
• Quality measurement
• Agent desktop
• Remote workforce
• Automation and self-service

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

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

Five of the 21 vendors responded positively to our requests for additional information and provided completed questionnaires and demonstrations to help in our evaluation of their subscription management products. We categorize participation as follows:

Complete participation: The following vendors actively participated and provided completed questionnaires and demonstrations to help in our evaluation of their product: Content Guru, Emplifi, Genesys, LiveVox and NICE.

Partial participation: The following vendors provided limited information to help in our evaluation: AWS, Avaya, Dialpad, Five9, Salesforce, Talkdesk and Vonage.

No participation: The following vendors provided no information or did not respond to our request: 8x8, Alvaria, Cisco, Enghouse Interactive, Microsoft, Mitel, RingCentral, Twilio, and Zoom.

Vendors 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 significant impact on their classification and rating, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those vendors.

Products Evaluated

Vendors of Note

We did not include vendors that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in the Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Vendors of Note.”