Market Perspectives

ISG Research is happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Contact Center Advanced: ISG Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG Research.

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.

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.

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.

This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of customer experience software offerings. We encourage you to learn more about our Buyers Guide and its effectiveness as a provider selection and RFI/RFP tool.

We urge organizations to do a thorough job of evaluating advanced contact center offerings in this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these software providers and as an evaluation methodology. The Buyers Guide can be used to evaluate existing suppliers, plus provides evaluation criteria for new projects. Using it can shorten the cycle time for an RFP and the definition of an RFI.

The Buyers Guide for Contact Center Advanced in 2024 finds NICE first on the list, followed by Verint and Genesys.

Software providers that rated in the top three of any category ﹘ including the product and customer experience dimensions ﹘ earn the designation of Leader.

The Leaders in Product Experience are:

• NICE
• Verint
• Genesys

The Leaders in Customer Experience are:

• NICE
• Genesys
• Verint

The Leaders across any of the seven categories are:

• NICE, which has achieved this rating in seven of the seven categories.
• Genesys in five categories.
• Salesforce in three categories.
• Verint in two categories.
• Content Guru, Dialpad, Sprinklr and Talkdesk in one category.

The overall performance chart provides a visual representation of how providers rate across product and customer experience. Software providers with products scoring higher in a weighted rating of the five product experience categories place farther to the right. The combination of ratings for the two customer experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. As a result, providers that place closer to the upper-right are “exemplary” and rated higher than those closer to the lower-left and identified as providers of “merit.” Software providers that excelled at customer experience over product experience have an “assurance” rating, and those excelling instead in product experience have an “innovative” rating.

Note that close provider scores should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well-suited for use by every enterprise or process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle advanced contact centers, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences that can make one provider’s offering a better fit than another.

ISG Research has made every effort to encompass in this Buyers Guide the overall product and customer experience from our advanced contact center blueprint, which we believe reflects what a well-crafted RFP should contain. Even so, there may be additional areas that affect which software provider and products best fit an enterprise’s particular requirements. Therefore, while this research is complete as it stands, utilizing it in your own organizational context is critical to ensure that products deliver the highest level of support for your projects.

You can find more details on our community as well as on our expertise in the research for this Buyers Guide.