The Best Contact Center Analytics: The 2020 CRM Industry Leader Awards

The Market

The global market for contact center analytics was estimated at $977.3 million this year and is projected to reach $2.6 billion by 2027, growing at a compound annual rate of 15.4 percent, according to Global Industry Analysts. Of that amount, on-demand solutions are projected to record 15.9 percent CAGR and reach $1.7 billion by 2027, while the on-premises segment is expected to witness a 14.7 percent CAGR for the next seven years.

Advances in the technology have meant that speech analytics, the staple of this market, is now being joined by text, desktop, sentiment, intent, and other forms of analytics, which are increasingly becoming predictive, adaptive, and more real-time. And as with most CRM technologies, the impact that artificial intelligence is having on this market cannot be overstated.

The Top Five

As artificial intelligence takes hold of the analytics market, few companies have done more with the technology than CallMiner, according to Ian Jacobs, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. “CallMiner has gotten further in that effort than most,” he says. “This helps CallMiner to enable customers to act in real time and not just rely on historical analysis.” This commitment to AI can be seen in the company’s release in July of Illuminate, an AI-driven search feature to help companies discover, extract, and act on insights from voice and text interactions with customers. CallMiner’s products are so good, adds Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting, because “interaction analytics is their sole focus.” The company also provides “strong emotion and sentiment capabilities,” she adds.

Clarabridge has always had a reputation for being responsive to its customers, and this year, the company really excelled at that. It also leads in both simplicity and the ability to interact with other technologies. “Clarabridge has built an eminently sensible maturity model that makes it a straightforward exercise [to get started with analytics],” Jacobs says. “Clarabridge leads the pack when it comes to aggregating numerous data sources for a unified approach to analytics.” Clarabridge’s interaction analytics “comes with more than 150 out-of-the-box categorization model templates,” Fluss says, “and its AI is designed and customized to address the voice of the customer.”

NICE has won the top spot among contact center analytics vendors for many years, and analysts are not backing away from their enthusiasm about the company this year. “NICE Nexidia continues to lead the market with thoughtful, impactful analytics innovations and deployments. Definitely they are the thought leaders in this category,” says Paul Stockford, chief analyst at Saddletree Research. Jacobs highlights some of that innovation: “Unlike many vendors that rely on third parties for transcription, NICE builds its own language models that support a wide range of languages,” he says. “NICE also takes analytics a step further by using the technology to drive automated quality management, allowing brands to explore the quality of every call they have with customers.”

Sestek, a newcomer to the leaderboard this year, has gained recognition in 2020 for a slate of technologies that are all internally developed in an era when many analytics vendors are adding capabilities through partnerships. “They provide a broad suite of speech technologies, including interaction analytics,” Fluss states, “and proprietary AI capabilities power all of their solutions.”

Verint Systems has been a leader in the speech analytics space for decades, and as its technology stable has grown, it has taken a different approach than many of its peers. “Verint uses different engines for speech and text analytics,” Fluss says. “Their AI-based semantic intelligence layer is highly effective at theme and topic extraction. And its new user interface is modern and user-friendly and gives users the exact information they need.”