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North American Agent Performance Optimization Markets
Frost & Sullivan, July 2010, Pages: 86
This research service titled North American Agent Performance Optimization Markets provides an in-depth analysis of the market drivers and restraints, industry trends, and competitive environment in addition to the challenges and issues faced by market participants. In this research, Frost & Sullivan's expert analysts thoroughly examine the following: call recording/logging and quality monitoring systems and workforce management and scheduling.
Market Overview
Avenues to Growth are changing in the North American Agent Performance Optimization Markets
With diminishing greenfield opportunities, growth in the North American agent performance optimization (APO) markets will have to be generated through alternative avenues. Primary issues include globalization, competitive displacement, options outside the contact center, and movement up the value chain to enhanced applications and services. Vendors in this space are responding to the changing market by striking out in all four of those directions. “In both quality monitoring (QM) and workforce management software (WFM), the majority of vendors are already global companies with presence in less mature markets including the Asia Pacific (APAC), Europe and the Middle East, (EMEA) and Central America and Latin America (CALA), ” notes the analyst of this research service. “Among smaller vendors, we have seen a decisive move to align with new technology and channel partners to broaden exposure to potential new market regions.”
Although the prospects for the market look upbeat, there are some challenges reining in market progression. The economic downturn has changed priorities. As buyers are operating on shoestring budgets, new projects have been either put on hold or delayed. Earlier, there was optimism that APO would turn out to be recession-resistant on the theory that WFM and QM can be positioned as cost-control mechanisms in an expensive labor environment. In a Frost & Sullivan end-user survey conducted in Q1 2009, a majority of contact center managers (57 percent) reported about plans for maintaining their existing headcounts through 2009. The remaining respondents were nearly split between raising and cutting headcount. This suggested that they would be looking at other methods of cost control, such as using technology to enhance the productivity of existing staff and allocating resources more effectively. It now appears that what really happened in 2009 was an attempt to literally “do more with less” by maintaining relatively stable staffing without making new technology purchases. The overall marketplace for APO has consolidated around several large players that have the majority of the market share in both APO categories. NICE, Verint, and Aspect have all expanded their market footprints through acquisition and internal product expansion. In the middle of the market, vendors such as Envision, HigherGround, VPI, and others have collaborated with application partners to fill gaps in their APO offerings.
End users have a significant amount of leeway to put their APO tools together as a patchwork of different vendors' offerings. This is true even if they are inclined toward suites because of the many integration and partnership agreements that cover the vendor landscape. “With the core APO market relatively mature, it is imperative for vendors is to provide a business rationale for upgrades and enhancements to a very well-established technology,” says the analyst. “That rationale will likely be found in value-added applications that combine performance improvement with deeper analytic insights into customer behavior.” To make those enhancements appear worthwhile, vendors have to provide demonstrable proof points, illustrated by clear case studies. The chances for growth, going forward, depend greatly on vendors’ ability to convince contact centers that there is more to APO systems than the core, commoditized tools that everyone already has; they have to sell demonstrable benefits from enhanced applications
Market Sectors
Expert Frost & Sullivan analysts thoroughly examine the following market sectors in this research:
- Call recording/logging and quality monitoring systems (QM)
- Workforce management (WFM)
- Scheduling
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