Market Perspectives

Contact centers are investing in a wealth of new ideas for better assisting their agents. These include engagement tools, better knowledge management and a more robust hiring pipeline and retention strategies. Also, a rising theme from many contact center users and providers is the availability of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technologies. Ventana Research asserts that by 2026, three-quarters of organizations will have expanded the stakeholders influencing customer experience software buying decisions resulting in greater accountability and better resource allocation. This suggests that contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) vendors need to be able to express the value of contact center tech more broadly, including the ability to boost customer acquisition, loyalty, value, and other outcome-based key performance indicators (KPIs).

This has made it an interesting time to be a CCaaS vendor. Competition in this space is fierce, which has led to a high level of feature parity between the various cloud vendors, and between them and traditional on-premises systems. Content Guru is one such vendor in the U.K. Stepping into the U.S. market just a couple years ago, Content Guru has proven itself to be a reliable CCaaS provider as it establishes itself in new territory.

In the U.K. and Northern Europe, Content Guru has worked with clients across a wide band of industries that include government/public sector, construction and manufacturing, utilities and health care. The company introduced to the U.S. a portfolio of applications for contact centers that includes tools for workforce optimization, knowledge management and AI, and disaster recovery and business continuity solutions.

Content Guru primarily serves mid-market and enterprise-level clients. The main product is storm, an omnichannel platform that blends interactions from across channels into a single queue. One of storm’s strengths is its openness; it can connect to any third-party application or database. Given the importance of un-siloing and centralizing contact center data resources, this stands out as a plus for potential buyers.

Over the past year, Content Guru has made a number of improvements to its capability set. One improvement is the deepening of the knowledge management toolset via storm’s Customer Knowledge System (CKS). The CKS is used to centralize the knowledge base through articles and decision trees to better assist agents and storm’s users. Content Guru has also launched a new version of the storm Desktop Task Assistant (DTA) that builds on its user interface and increases its accessibility and flexibility.

Content Guru participated in the 2022 Ventana Research Value Index on Agent Management and ranked fourth overall, and it was categorized as an Exemplary Vendor. Content Guru performed well in measures related to how its customers experience its services. It notably provides a consistent and deep pool of information for potential and existing customers as they proceed along the relationship’s journey.

The company has announced news around customer acquisitions including agencies of the U.K. government and companies in the U.S. and Europe. In one case, Content Guru built a video collaboration application for Herts Urgent Care to operate its services digitally. Going forward, we expect that Content Guru will continue its ongoing development plans to align with the accelerating technology shifts occurring in contact centers: AI applications geared to agents and the need for cloud-based reliability and security solutions.

Most of the vendors in the U.S. CCaaS market have been in the space for years, some mixing unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) features with contact center tools. Content Guru is continuing to develop in the U.S. market that was, until recently, focused on replacing legacy on-premises equipment with cloud services. As cloud has become a default option for most new installations, CCaaS vendors are competing against each other for displacement business in addition to their on-premises peers. With technology moving so quickly, any feature/functionality advantage one vendor has is quickly matched by the rest, forcing all of them to differentiate based on things like customer support, usability, security, global reach and partnerships. These are areas in which Content Guru is a strong competitor.

Since expanding into the U.S., Content Guru has established a positive reputation which should help it continue to gain visibility and more customers here. Organizations in the U.S looking for a robust and secure CCaaS platform should put Content Guru on their shortlist. Some CCaaS providers in the states are still emphasizing the virtues of the cloud (cost and scalability, mainly) to potential customers. But these days, the attention to security and business continuity are more compelling arguments, which Content Guru is likely to win.