The Best Contact Center Infrastructure: The 2022 CRM Industry Leader Awards

The Market

Research firm MarketsandMarkets has valued the current market for contact center software at $35.2 billion and projects it to reach $93.7 billion by 2027, growing at a compound annual rate of 21.6 percent. That’s a significant increase from last year, when the firm predicted a market value of $75.5 billion by 2026.

Fellow analyst firm P&S Intelligence is forecasting the market to reach $102.8 billion in 2030, growing at a compounded annual rate of 18 percent.

As with last year, COVID has had a huge impact on the contact center market, particularly as contact centers continued to deploy automation to streamline operations that have remained hybrid or fully remote.

And while cloud deployment models have long been expected to dominate the contact center market, MarketsandMarkets projects that on-premises deployments will continue to share large revenue, noting that on-premises deployment is preferable for organizations that are data-sensitive, have a large number of agents and a high volume of calls, and require greater system security.

The firm notes that the contact center market is undergoing significant technological transitions, with the cloud, Big Data, artificial intelligence-enabled bots, real-time chat, and recommendation engines dominating news cycles and boardroom discussions.

The Top Five

Amazon Web Services launched its Connect contact center suite in 2017, and many argued that it was not as feature-rich as other products on the market. AWS is putting those claims to rest. “With steady delivery of innovative solutions like Customer Profiles, Tasks, and Cases, Amazon Connect is increasingly looked at by companies large and small,” says Sheila McGee-Smith, founder and principal analyst of McGee-Smith Analytics. “This is the future of contact centers, and having it tied to a public cloud vendor has some massive advantages,” says Ray Wang, founder and chairman of Constellation Research. “The product team is eager to incorporate customer-prioritized features, and the pace of innovation has been amazing.”

Five9's failed takeover by Zoom Video Communications late last year hasn't hurt the company in the least. It might even have strengthened the company's resolve to lead the market. "With a focus on product innovation, excellence in go-to-market execution, and a strong and evolving partner ecosystem, we continue to strengthen our relationships with customers and bring new businesses onto the Five9 platform," CEO Rowan Trollope said then. But its own acquisition of Inference Solutions in 2020 might have had the most impact. That move "jump-started its delivery of first-class automation solutions at just the time the market was ready for them," McGee-Smith says.

Most analysts agree that Genesys is a hands-down contact center favorite. Genesys Cloud platform “is a top-tier leader with a complete suite of applications,” McGee-Smith says. Independent CRM analyst Marshall Lager agrees, saying that Genesys offers “something for every need.” Analysts are also enthusiastic about Genesys’s ability to support large international markets and to adopt new technologies, particularly AI and process automation. Genesys “is displacing traditional players as customers look to more flexible and cloud-based solutions for managing hybrid contact centers,” says Rebecca Wettemann, founder and CEO of Valoir.

With its CXone product suite, few can question NICE’s market dominance in the contact center space. CXone, which has matured greatly in the past few years, is a “full suite of applications that work on a common platform, including one with increasing importance: robotic process automation,” McGee-Smith says. And the individual applications within the suite, she adds “are best-in-class.” But the company is not resting on its laurels, according to Wang. “The team at NICE continues to build on its previous success and continues to add new offerings,” he says.

Twilio’s Flex is by far the youngest product on the market, having been launched in 2018, but what it lacks in long standing it makes up for in functionality. Lager calls it “solid,” saying it offers “a stuffed toolbox.” Wettemann is also a fan. “With a focus on agility and flexibility, Twilio is increasingly on the short list for customers considering a move to a cloud contact center as well as new businesses,” she says.