About This Constellation ShortList™
Contact center solutions have largely stayed the course in function: enabling organizations to route, address, and resolve inbound customer interactions and engagements. Contact center as a service (CCaaS) shifts this critical front line of customer experience (CX) to the cloud with the promise of a scalable infrastructure and a flexible tool set to modernize the contact center that has become more complex.
CCaaS solutions must support the contact center as a new revenue and growth center, as opposed to being an operational cost center. Agents, well trained and well versed in addressing customer issues, problems, and concerns, are now also expected to be part of an overarching upsell and cross-sell mandate to drive growth within existing accounts and markets. This has led to greater expectations for smart decisioning, next-best-action recommendations, and critical customer insights to aid agents in navigating the tricky space between delivering the experience customers expect and the potential to drive revenue with each engagement.
AI-powered tools including smart routing, intelligent workforce planning, agent assist, sentiment analysis, chatbots, Interactive Virtual Agents (IVA), data management, and process automation have become core considerations in provider selection.
Wait for this market to undergo some potential change over the coming year as new players to the space like Zoom, Google, and a reshaped offering from Microsoft are expected to reach implementation thresholds in 2023 and will soon be included in this review.
Threshold Criteria
Constellation considers the following criteria for these offerings:
- Workflow management for process and engagement orchestration
- Flexible delivery models for private, public, and multicloud environments
- Cross-channel workflow and architected journeys to deliver comprehensive service, including always-on self-service content, chatbots, and interactive voice response (IVR) experiences
- Rich library of resources and agent engagement and support tools to boost performance
- Global infrastructure and network footprint for global reach and coverage
- Deep knowledge base and community resource center for users
- Application of AI and ML models for data analytics, smart routing, next-best agent action, virtual agents (text and voice), and chatbot engagement
- Advanced AI application for voice and sentiment scanning via natural-language processing
- Scalable pricing and service models
- Collaboration workspaces for agent resources and problem solving across internal experts
- Security and privacy controls and rule-based/role-based data and account governance
- Documented uptime and network reliability for large-scale remote agent deployments
- Robust analytics and reporting on agent and platform performance
- Multichannel customer engagement channels, including voice, messaging, social, and SMS
- App marketplace or libraries to extend platform capabilities
- Integrations and connectors to business tools such as CRM, customer data platforms (CDPs), and core customer service operations and help desk solutions
The Constellation ShortList™
Constellation evaluates 21 solutions categorized in this market. This Constellation ShortListis determined by client inquiries, partner conversations, customer references, vendor selection projects, market share, and internal research.
- 8x8
- Avaya Experience Platform™
- Amazon Connect
- Five9
- Genesys
- NICE
- RingCentral
- TalkDesk
Frequency of Evaluation
Each Constellation ShortList is updated at least once per year. Updates may occur after six months if deemed necessary.
Evaluation Services
Constellation clients can work with the analyst and the research team to conduct a more thorough discussion of this ShortList. Constellation can also provide guidance in vendor selection and contract negotiation.