The Best Contact Center Infrastructure: The 2023 CRM Industry Leader Awards

THE MARKET

Verified Market Research valued the global contact center infrastructure market at $19.5 billion in 2020 and expects it to reach $55.6 billion by 2028, growing at a compound annual rate of 13.9 percent.

The market, it says, includes the physical and virtual resources that contact centers need to operate efficiently. These include call distributors, integrated voice response units, computer-telephony integration, queue management, call monitoring, analysis and reporting, and communication systems spanning phone, email, chat, SMS, social media, web, mobile, video, and others, as well as the technologies needed to integrate customer data. It includes both inbound and outbound capabilities.

Analysts expect to see growing interest in integrations with CRM systems and other business applications to give agents a comprehensive picture of client information and enable more informed interactions.

And look for the cloud to be the de facto deployment mode. “The future of contact center software is in the cloud, although there will continue to be organizations that use premises-based solutions for the foreseeable future,” says Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting.

THE TOP FIVE

Launched just five years ago, Amazon Connect from Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the latest entry in the space, but it’s by no means the least. “Amazon Connect has emerged as a contact center innovator because they threw out the rule book and truly started from scratch,” says Sheila McGee-Smith, founder and principal analyst of McGee-Smith Analytics. Max Ball, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, shares that enthusiasm. “AWS has invested heavily in its modern, microservices-based system, focusing more on extensibility than out-of-the-box polish,” he says. “Connect has matured to the point where it takes advantage of AWS’s technology and go-to-market strengths to provide a unique offering.”

It’s been a busy year for Five9, which just acquired Aceyus to help streamline the migration of customers from on-premises to the cloud and leverage contextual data for personalized experiences. That’s a huge deal as Five9 advances its Intelligent CX Platform as the centerpiece of its offerings. Ball calls the company “a long-standing leader in this space,” noting that it provides “powerful omnichannel capabilities with a strong focus on AI, data, and analytics.”

Genesys spent a great deal of time and resources reorganizing its contact center suite following its 2016 acquisition of Interactive Intelligence, and those efforts have largely been completed with Genesys Cloud CX at the center of its portfolio. McGee-Smith sees great things ahead following that move. “The strategy to laser-focus innovation on a single platform, Genesys Cloud CX, should mean even greater success in the future,” she says. For Marshall Lager, an independent CRM analyst and consultant, Genesys Cloud CX is “the go-to recommendation for contact centers.” John Ragsdale, vice president and research director of the Technology & Services Industry Association, agrees, noting that Genesys is “always pushing the envelope with emerging digital capabilities, broad channel coverage, and fully automated quality monitoring.”

Following some corporate reshuffling in the past few years, CXone has emerged as the centerpiece of NICE’s entire contact center portfolio, and with good reason. Analysts have long said that CXone is a complete package that contains everything a contact center could ever want, and it’s only getting better with NICE’s ongoing development around its Enlighten AI engine. “With CXone, NICE has melded functionality into a single platform that provides omnichannel customer service, full workforce optimization capabilities, and powerful AI,” Ball says.

Verint seems to have revised its contact center strategy around a digital, open contact center-as-a-service strategy that has certainly caught the attention of analysts and consultants. “Verint’s open CCaaS is focused on helping customers optimize their contact centers, taking a digital-first, not telephony-first, approach,” says Rebecca Wettemann, CEO and founder of Valoir. But it’s keyed in to other industry trends, she says: “The company is continuing to invest in platform capabilities, such as AI, that can be reused across multiple channels and an open architecture that helps customers to evolve and optimize channels at their own pace.”