The Best Contact Center Analytics: The 2021 CRM Industry Leader Awards

The Market

Verified Market Research valued the worldwide contact center analytics market at $970 million in 2019 and expects it to reach $2.96 billion by 2027, growing at a compound annual rate of 16.2 percent.

The market in just the past few years has moved toward increasing demand for predictive analytics and real-time monitoring capabilities, but also high on the list of priorities for contact center operators is the ability to integrate data from multiple customer channels and enterprise systems.

As has been the case for a long time, system costs are a major inhibitor of market growth, but as with most software, the cloud deployment option is making contact center analytics more affordable for companies of all sizes.

The Top Five

CallMiner has been a top contender for a long time, and its launch a year ago of Illuminate made its contact center analytics among the simplest product lines to use. Illuminate is an artificial intelligence-driven search feature to help companies discover, extract, and act on insights from voice and text interactions with customers. CallMiner also built out some incredibly useful tools, including an auto-redaction feature and AI-driven alerts to power next-best-action guidance. “Providing a call recorder-agnostic solution, CallMiner is one of the leading choices for companies looking for a best-of-breed approach to analytics,” says Ian Jacobs, a vice president and research director at Forrester Research.

Gridspace is a relative newcomer to the contact center analytics elite. Its flagship Sift product allows organizations to observe 100 percent of their real-time communications, uncover population-level customer issues, drive back-office efficiencies with automated quality scoring, and seamlessly conduct compliance and brand reputation checks. Its greatest strength is its scalability, made possible by a partnership this year with Google Cloud. “Gridspace provides 100 percent real-time analytics on every call or audio stream. The company’s real calling card is its ability to provide real-time analytics at massive scale. 25,000 concurrent calls? No problem,” Jacobs says.

NICE has been dumping a lot of its attention and investment into its CXone contact center suite, which has plenty of contact center analytics capabilities built in, but its Nexidia contact center analytics line is still a top-tier option for contact centers. The company continues to expand the product with innovations in predictive, artificial intelligence, sentiment analysis, and engagement optimization capabilities.

It’s hard to say where Clarabridge will end up following its acquisition by Qualtrics in late July for $1.1 billion, but the move is being hailed as a benefit for both companies. “With this acquisition, Qualtrics has the ability to analyze and find insights in both structured and unstructured customer and employee conversations. Enterprise customers are looking for these capabilities and will find it helpful to have them available from one vendor,” observes Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting. But even before the acquisition, Clarabridge had made some pretty significant moves on its own in the past year, including integrations with Oracle Cloud CX Service, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Five9, as well as its release of Auto Narratives, a feature for call summaries, and Clara, an intelligent search feature. “For brands looking to extend their digital interaction and social analytics to speech analytics and to potentially look at all those interactions holistically, Clarabridge provides an integrated method for gleaning customer insights,” Jacobs observes.

Verint just acquired Conversocial in early August, adding to its capabilities around social media and messaging, but the company has long been a powerhouse in the analytics space. Its latest efforts have centered on unifying its various contact center, data, analytics, and knowledge products into enterprise-wide interaction hubs, a move that will position it well for years to come. Also of note is the company’s efforts to infuse its DaVinci AI and Analytics—which includes advanced machine learning models, natural language processing, intent models, and analytics engines—into the Verint Customer Engagement Cloud Platform.