The Best Contact Center Interaction Analytics: The 2023 CRM Industry Leader Awards

THE MARKET

Emergen Research valued the contact center analytics market at $1.2 billion in 2021 and expects it to grow at a compound annual rate of 18.9 percent through 2030, when it is projected to reach $5.7 billion. Growth, researchers say, will be driven by companies’ need for improved service quality and the ability to monitor service metrics from employee performance, call times, customer satisfaction, and customer effort.

Though originally dominated by speech and the phone channel, other channels, including email, SMS, social media, and mobile apps, have taken up most of the attention now. Speech analytics made up just 24 percent of the total market in 2021, according to Grand View Research data.

And while on-premises deployments still dominate the market, hosted deployments are expected to register higher growth in the next few years due to the growing adoption of work-from-home models among contact centers.

Another significant change in the past few years is the shift from large enterprises to smaller firms. In 2021, large enterprises accounted for more than 57 percent of global revenue, but small and midsize firms are anticipated to register the fastest growth through 2030.

THE TOP FIVE

Many analysts have called CallMiner’s interaction analytics among the most complete in the industry. Christina McAllister, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, says CallMiner is “one of the best choices for enterprises looking for the full package” and notes that its use of artificial intelligence alongside practical enterprise workflows allows companies “to easily extend value across various use cases.” CallMiner this year added functionality to its real-time agent guidance product, RealTime, combining in-the-moment and post-interaction analytics, machine learning, and generative AI for next-best-action guidance, call flow and script adherence, upsell or cross-sell opportunity identification, and live listen capabilities.

Genesys hasn’t traditionally been known for analytics, but that is starting to change. Its growth, both organically and by acquisition, “has enabled it to extend its analytics and AI capabilities to provide customers with a common set of services that can be reused across channels,” observes Rebecca Wettemann, founder and CEO of Valoir. And to bolster the insights available, Genesys this year launched the Experience Index to help determine which agent actions detract from customer engagement and loyalty. It combines human sentiment with industry benchmarks and data from Genesys Cloud CX and other sources to pinpoint where experiences go wrong and what needs to be done to fix them.

Gridspace has often been seen as a niche player, excelling in highly regulated environments like healthcare and financial services, but its products and innovations are becoming more mainstream, according to many analysts. The company, McAllister says, “has been at the forefront of innovation in speech technology, leveraging its own large language models that are specific to contact center use cases.” She further hails Gridspace’s products as highly accurate and expects “some very promising capabilities on the horizon.”

NICE has been a stalwart of the interaction analytics space for decades, and 2023 has been no different. Its CXone Interaction Analytics is AI-powered, omnichannel, and able to identify trends and root causes across 100 percent of interactions—whether they’re voice, text, or digital—to understand what was communicated, identify outcomes, and evaluate the overall experience. Analysts expect the product suite to only get better and further NICE’s dominance in this area as the company continues to more deeply incorporate its Enlighten AI engine.

Verint has long been an analytics powerhouse, and its portfolio only grows stronger as it keeps adding new technologies and data sources. “Verint’s ability to analyze all engagement data (omnichannel interactions, survey data, and workforce performance data) with the appropriate analytical tools, including its DaVinci AI, as well as its open data hub that enables customers to rapidly import and export data for analysis, means it can help customers understand and maximize the opportunities to automate interactions and improve outcomes,” Wettemann says.