The Best Contact Center Interaction Analytics: The 2022 CRM Industry Leader Awards

The Market

Grand View Research values the current contact center interaction analytics market at $1.2 billion; fellow research firm MarketsandMarkets puts it closer to $1.8 billion today and expects it to top $2.9 billion by 2027.

Companies have demonstrated high demand for analytics, particularly as they need to keep track of the large number of agents who are still working at home or in hybrid environments.

While contact center analytics takes many forms and involves many technologies, it got its start as speech analytics, which is still dominant, holding a 24 percent share of the entire market, according to MarketsandMarkets’ data.

Virtually all major contact center analytics providers offer some version of speech analytics, either of their own design or licensed from third-party developers. Analyzing speech alone provides a lot of valuable information, but most modern offerings also encompass non-voice channels as well. Data inputs that modern solutions capture include agent performance statistics, screen actions, self-serve activities, voice-of-the customer feedback, and text, chat, email, and social media interactions.

Vendors are also bringing additional technologies to bear, including natural language processing, artificial intelligence, sentiment analysis, emotion detection, desktop analytics, social media monitoring, agent coaching, and real-time and predictive capabilities. The result is advanced offerings that help companies better understand customer needs and preferences while helping assure compliance with laws and regulations.

On-premises deployments still account for more than 58 percent of vendors’ revenue, but the work-from-home trend has pushed the need for cloud-based technologies.

Another trend is the growing use of contact center analytics by smaller firms. While large enterprises held a 57 percent share of the market in 2021, according to MarketsandMarkets, vendors are working hard to to put their solutions within reach of even the smallest of firms.

The Top Five

CallMiner, like a few vendors in this category, began as a pure speech recognition company and has since expanded its capabilities to encompass the broader contact center interaction analytics suite, according to Dick Bucci, founder and chief analyst at Pelorus Research, who points out that CallMiner’s technology is so good it is used by Genesys and Alvaria in their suites. It also integrates with many of the top cloud vendor solutions and recently even incorporated popular meeting platforms Microsoft Teams and Zoom.

Since buying Nexidia in 2016, NICE has expanded what was already a powerful solution set. And now the company is rolling much of that technology into its CXone cloud contact center suite. With the addition of Enlighten AI, companies can analyze every moment of every interaction to identify behaviors that drive good experiences for customers and agents. Bucci sees NICE offering “greater customer value from the unification of analytics, performance management, and workforce management.”

Still hot off its deal to buy Clarabridge in mid-2021 for $1.1 billion, Qualtrics is on a path to market leadership. An impressive product lineup only grew in the past year, with the additions of Experience ID, Quality Management, Digital Experience (DX) Metrics, and XM Discover. Qualtrics also grew its already extensive partner network with ServiceNow and SAP Service Cloud integrations.

Leading the field of vendors incorporating contact center interaction analytics into larger contact center-as-a-service suites and platforms is Talkdesk, which is doing so with its Interaction Analytics AI-powered speech and text analytics tool, according to Bucci. “Graphical displays easily visualize trending topics and variations on customer interest and sentiments and trigger alerts and address negative experiences quickly,” he says.

Verint is also rolling its interaction analytics products into other offerings, including the recent move to bring real-time voice analytics and quality monitoring into its Real-Time Agent Assist. That’s a move that John Ragsdale, vice president and research director at the Technology & Services Industry Association (TSIA), says allows for faster insights so agent coaching is contextual. Other analysts see another strength: “Verint has done an exceptional job of pulling together data points from its many contact center applications under the Verint Cloud Platform to extract the underlying trends and events that shape consumer behavior,” Bucci says.

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