The Best Contact Center Infrastructure: The 2024 CRM Industry Leader Awards

The Market

The contact center infrastructure (CCI) market is a framework of physical and virtual resources, including equipment, software, and services, that enable customer service organizations to manage customer interactions across multiple channels. The technologies involved include automatic call distributors, outbound dialers, interactive voice response systems, virtual assistants, computer-telephony integration, queue management, and much more. Growing areas of interest for both vendors and end users include artificial intelligence, CRM and back-office system integrations, social media, analytics, and digital interactions like chatbots and voicebots.

The market has seen tremendous growth in the past few years, with research firm MarketsandMarkets valuing it at $42.5 billion in 2023 and projecting it to grow to $218.3 billion by 2032, at a compound annual rate of 19.6 percent.

The Top Five

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a well-earned reputation as one of the most versatile and reliable cloud service providers in the world. So when the company launched its Amazon Connect cloud-based contact center platform in 2017, people took notice. Connect is a suite of cloud-based contact center services that leverage the artificial intelligence powering Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant to handle contact center calls and texts, as well as Lex, the artificial intelligence-based service that relies on the same automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology and natural language understanding (NLU) that powers Alexa. Originally created for designing contact flows, managing agents, and tracking performance metrics, AWS has steadily added features, functionality, integrations, and tie-ins to other AWS services in the past seven years.

Five9 has been a top competitor in the CCI space for a long time, and its position in the industry is only getting stronger. “Five9 continues to invest in its [contact center-as-a-service] core capabilities and its Genius AI, which focuses on listening and analyzing, tailoring models, and then applying those models to intelligently automate customer experience workflows in one unified environment,” observes Rebecca Wettemann, founder and CEO of Valoir.

Since its 2016 acquisition of Interactive Intelligence for about $1.4 billion, Genesys has steadily been building scale in the face of fierce competition in the contact center market. Its completely cloud-based, purpose-built platform has been extremely robust for years, and it’s only getting better. “There’s steady and strong investment in the overall platform and its applications,” says Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting. Wettemann has also seen this trend, pointing out that today “Genesys’ openness of platform, composable architecture, and expanding ecosystems enable customers to rapidly build, deploy, and adapt their CCI to meet evolving business needs.” Sheila McGee-Smith, president and principal analyst of McGee-Smith Analytics, credits Genesys with having “best-in-breed CCaaS applications.”

NICE first rolled out its CXone cloud contact center platform in 2017, and since then it has become one of the de facto standard-bearers for what a CCI platform is supposed to be. Boasting one of the largest arrays of native applications to manage customer journeys, improve employee engagement, and drive complete performance, CXone “is a very robust and feature-rich platform with an AI hub (Enlighten), and strong native supporting applications, like workforce management, workforce engagement, agent assist, knowledge management, analytics, automation, and enhanced outbound following the LiveVox acquisition” at the end of last year, Fluss says. For McGee-Smith, NICE is one of the “preferred choices for the largest and most sophisticated contact center operations” and she credits the company for having “extensive AI teams building proprietary CX-specific AI models and applications.”

Like so many other vendors in the space, Verint has invested heavily in its contact center platforms in the past few years, with a lot of resources dedicated to automation. Of particular note is its attention to customer service bots, “enabling customers to automate tasks and interactions intelligently with AI that reduces costs while improving customer and agent experiences,” Wettemann notes.

Niche Players

Analysts this year identified a number of vendors in the CCI space as niche players to watch. They include Content Guru, Sprinklr, USAN, and Microsoft. Of these, Microsoft is perhaps the most notable because it only introduced Microsoft Dynamics Contact Center in June.