New analysis from Frost & Sullivan's Digital Transformation program finds that growth continues in all areas of the contact center market: premise-based systems, the cloud, and hybrid configurations. Analytics, quality monitoring, and recording continue to be bright spots for growth, but emerging areas are taking center stage as companies transition from multichannel contact centers to fully featured omnichannel customer care.

Frost & Sullivan cites four key trends that are dominating solution providers' research and development and go-to-market plans. Omnichannel customer care addresses the functional silos and breakpoints in context continuity of the customer journey. Digital transformation, the process of using digital technologies including advanced communications to remove cumbersome obstacles to growth that have built up in an organization over time, is now a mainstream component in strategic plans. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the contact center has moved front and center: the industry has matured past using AI in point solutions, such as virtual assistants and bots, to being infused across the customer contact landscape. Workforce engagement management also has emerged as a term and concept, and is a tenet in the development and application of solutions geared at improving the employee experience in the same way as improving the customer experience.

The industry has finally reached the edge of the hype cycle for AI as an umbrella term and is actively harnessing a set of technologies under the term to infuse intelligence across the customer contact landscape. Just as important, providers in this guide are learning how to properly market and position their AI wares and level setting customers as to where they should be in using them now and in the future.

Narrowing down the list of vendors to pursue can be time-consuming. The purpose of this buyers guide is to provide enterprise organizations with a fundamental assessment of contact center system providers and their capabilities in a single report. The guide is based on extensive primary and secondary research and provides the reader with market trends and in-depth profiles of suppliers. The market for contact center solutions has become broad and complex, with dozens of options across contact center systems, cloud and business process outsourcing (BPO) providers.

The guide is divided into 2 sections. Section 1 provides analyst commentary on the most important forces affecting the market. Section 2 highlights and assesses the capabilities of the top-performing North American cloud contact center providers. The list is not all-inclusive. Frost & Sullivan chose vendors based on the strength of vision and ability to execute.

Author: Nancy Jamison