The Market for Contact Center Optimization Technologies (Market Focus)

Content

• Catalyst
• Summary
• Methodology
  • AnaLYSIS
  • The WOTs market continues to evolve and broaden to include more holistic optimization technologies
  • Vendors seek to offer increased depth and breadth of functionality through multi- component solution offerings
  • Product integration is needed if the benefits of a WOTs deployment are to be fully realized
  • Strategic partnerships are essential for vendors unable to follow an acquisition strategy
  • Demand for customer-centric contact centers drives continued growth across the component types
  • Strong growth in WFM as adoption becomes more widespread
  • QM growth driven by speech analytics and 100% recording
  • The broadening scope of agent analytics stimulates demand for a more encompassing contact center analytics approach
  • Demand for broader functionality drives growth for eCoaching delivered to agent desktops
  • Vendors widen their sales focus as the high-end contact center market starts to saturate
  • Sales structures must reflect the broad range of contact center types to fully access opportunities for growth
  • The size of CCs adopting WOTs is gradually shrinking. While large centers are still a key focus, numerous vendors are now providing solutions specifically aimed at the small to medium CC environment. Therefore vendors looking to target products across a range of CC sizes must develop a sales structure to reflect this strategy. A one size fits all approach will not work in this market. As increasing numbers of vendors target the mid-market they must adopt more of a channel focus and push their products through indirect channels (further discussion of channel strategy can be found in the Strategy Focus paper for this research theme).
  • Traditional high-end vendors must provide scaled-down solutions if they are to successfully penetrate the mid-market
  • Technological developments and negative perceptions limit the demand for a hosted services model
  • Performance management helps contact centers realize value beyond the sum of the components
  • Integrations, partnerships and consolidation are key drivers toward a complete PM solution
  • The value of strong partnerships has already been discussed but needs to be reinforced in the case of PM. For PM to be achieved there must be a high degree of integration across the components. Effective partnering not only provides the opportunity to go to market with the full WO product set, but it is necessary to ensure that a PM solution can be deployed as quickly and as painlessly as possible. In essence, integration can provide many of the necessary links to produce a PM solution. Partnership can increase the depth of those links, while consolidation (with appropriate R&D efforts) should provide the equivalent of 100% inter-operability.
  • Services play a key role in helping contact centers realize value beyond the sum of the components
  • Individual WOTs components will provide a certain level of ROI; however, a multi-component solution with a service layer will offer far greater value to the CC than the value contributed by the sum of the individual components. For example, a WFM solution achieves a ROI based on more efficient scheduling of agent resources. This can be thought of as the stand-alone ROI from deploying the solution. If WFM is combined with broader contact center analytics its data can be utilized by the analytics solution; delivering a higher level of value from the WFM data. Adding this extra value often proves to be the hardest part of a PM solution deployment. Here services play a key part, enabling the vendor to add experience in the areas of data integration, key performance indicator (KPI) selection, measurement / benchmarking and other complementary solutions.
  • PM availability across contact centers looks set to increase as integration of components continues
  • Business-led consulting services continue to gain traction amongst vendors and customers
  • WOTs vendors add value through professional services, plugging the gap between the business and technology layer
  • Professional service engagements offer closer teaming opportunities with larger contact center system integrators
• Actions
• Further reading
  • Ask the analyst
• List of Tables
  • Table 1: Workforce management market size and growth, 2005-2010
  • Table 2: Quality Monitoring market size and growth, 2005-2010
• List of Figures
  • Figure 1: Optimizing CC performance is the number one investment priority over the next 3 years
  • Figure 2: Vendors move toward multi-component offerings to provide breadth and depth of functionality
  • Figure 3: eCoaching market size and growth, 2005-2010