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North American Hosted Contact Center Markets
Frost & Sullivan, Oct 2011, Pages: 58
This Frost & Sullivan research report covers the state of the North American hosted contact center market. Market segments covered include hosted IVR, hosted ACD, hosted chat, hosted outbound customer contact, and hosted agent performance optimization (APO) applications. The study discusses market trends, drivers and restraints, demand and supply, and strategic considerations. Market size and forecasts are provided for the individual market segments. In addition, an in-depth analysis of the vendor landscape, including vendor market shares, is given, along with the profiles of the leading vendors in the market.
The North American hosted contact center market has evolved for the most part over the last decade from stand-alone contact center systems/applications, delivered as hosted services. The main contact center systems/applications delivered as hosted services include: IVR, ACD, outbound and proactive customer contact, customer chat, and agent performance applications such as quality monitoring, workforce management, and analytics.
Most customers of hosted contact center services source one or more of these applications from a hosted provider, while retaining the rest on premise. As a result, most customers manage a hybrid environment of premise-based and hosted contact center applications. In many cases, customers choose to source different hosted applications from different hosted providers. The vendor landscape in North America includes over 80 hosted contact center solution providers, and can be categorized in a variety of ways:
- Hosted service providers versus platform vendors selling to hosted service providers
- Stand-alone/best-of-breed solution providers versus all-in-one/full-suite providers
- SMB market focused versus enterprise market focused solution providers
- Dedicated hosting versus multi-tenant and cloud-based solution providers
- Telecom service providers, contact center and IT outsourcers, specialist hosted solutions providers, and premise system vendors also offering hosted services
For the purposes of this study, only the hosted service provider market are focussed on, and not the technology/platform market. The scope of this study, however includes all of the other solution/provider categories noted above.
Market Trends
Demand Shift: Balancing Cost and Customer Experience
While cost containment/reduction is a high priority for almost all contact centers, many enterprises have been moving from a primary focus on cost containment to a more balanced dual focus on cost and customer experience. Hosted solution providers are increasingly highlighting customer experience improvement benefits of their solution, and related to that increased customer retention and revenue growth.
Demand Shift: Complete Contact Center Solutions
As enterprises recognize the advantages, both for efficiency and for improved customer service levels from tightly-linked contact center applications, they are demanding hosted providers to expand their services to support a greater breadth of contact center functionality. Service providers are responding by adding more features/functionality to their offerings. These new services include: support for social media customer communications, the broad application of analytics, agent performance optimization, support for chat, mobile, and outbound (pro-active customer contact).
Increasing Adoption and Growth in the Large Enterprise Market
The economic downturn in fact had a significant positive impact on the adoption of the hosted model among larger contact center organizations. Driven in large part by reduced IT budgets, several larger contact center organizations on the cusp of major technology enhancements/upgrades turned to hosted contact center solutions.
Start Small and Grow
The trend of enterprises starting with one hosted application and then adding other hosted services as their comfort-level/satisfaction grows, is likely to continue over the next several years.
Increasing Go-to-Market Partnerships
While most hosted contact center service providers rely primarily on their direct sales efforts, there is a growing trend among providers to expand go-to-market partnerships to increase indirect sales efforts.
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