Best Contact Center Analytics: The 2019 CRM Service Leaders Awards

THE MARKET

The contact center analytics market is expected to top $1.4 billion by 2022, according to a report from MarketsandMarkets. The report identifies increasing demand for customer experience management solutions that can provide a more complete view of customer data as a key driving factor. Additional growth drivers identified by the report include the proliferation of cloud computing, the increasing demand for text and speech analytics solutions, and growing compliance requirements.

The report also pinpoints an increasing demand for customer experience analytics that aggregate customer interactions, transaction, feedback, and agent data with an eye on providing a more complete picture of the customer journey. It goes on to say that contact center operations can leverage analytics from multiple channels to deliver better service to customers.

THE LEADERS

Calabrio had a strong performance across the board, with category-leading scores of 4.3 and 4.2 in company direction and customer satisfaction, respectively. It also posted a 3.8 in cost and a 3.7 in depth of functionality. The company “has done a lot to help customers take advantage of analytics, not just providing product but driving thought leadership and ways to accelerate time to value,” says Rebecca Wettemann, vice president at Nucleus Research. Paul Stockford, president and chief analyst at Saddletree Research, adds that Calabrio offers a “well-established solution for small to midsize contact centers and now is moving upmarket.”

Clarabridge earned strong scores in depth of functionality (3.8) and customer satisfaction (3.7), but struggled in the other two areas, posting a 3.3 in company direction and a 3.0 in cost. The company is “sort of the surprise player here,” says Ian Jacobs, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, who adds that it “uses the vast array of linguistic and machine learning capabilities that it developed for its text analytics to create a speech analytics product.” He goes on to say that Clarabridge’s ability to combine text analytics with speech analytics to provide real interaction analytics, as well as its voice-of-the-customer analytics, should make it an interesting player going forward.

Although it struggled a bit in the company direction area, with a 3.3, newcomer to the leaderboard Twilio otherwise turned in a strong performance, posting a 3.8 in cost and a 3.5 in both depth of functionality and customer satisfaction. Despite these scores, Twilio faced steep competition.

Verint Systems had a strong showing all around, scoring a 3.8 in both company direction and customer satisfaction and a 3.7 in both depth of functionality and cost. According to Jacobs, Verint “has taken an innovative approach to combining quality and analytics; creative packaging and easy-to-consume technology.” Stockford notes that the company “is pushing the analytics envelope, taking its solution deeper into the enterprise while still providing a full suite of analytics capabilities in the contact center and back office.”

THE WINNER

Once again, NICE takes the winner’s spot. The company had a category-leading 4.3 in depth of functionality, to go along with scores of 4.0 in company direction and customer satisfaction and a 3.7 in cost. Jacobs says that the company is “always a leader in the customer service world” and “has really pushed to provide value for other parts of the enterprise, including increasing cross-selling and upselling, predicting and reducing customer churn, and quickly addressing product quality issues.” Stockford adds that “analytics is the foundation for just about all NICE solutions,” and that its 2016 acquisition of Nexidia gave NICE a strong head start in advanced analytics. “NICE is setting the standard for analytics in the contact center,” he says.

ONE TO WATCH

Oracle is this year’s One to Watch despite lower scores across the board: a pair of 3.3 scores in depth of functionality and company direction, and a pair of 3.0 scores in customer satisfaction and cost. Wettemann notes that the company “is making big investments in artificial intelligence, but it’s a little early to see if it’s paying off in the contact center analytics space.”