New analysis from Frost & Sullivan's Digital Transformation program presents some of the customer experience trends that Frost & Sullivan believes will shape, grow, and influence customer contact and the customer experience. The study focuses on those growth insights that are the most relevant for 2020-2023 in North America, and highlights the trends and insights for selected industries, business models, and technology areas, including: • Inbound contact routing • Interactive voice response • Automated self-service • Outbound dialing • Workforce management • Call recording • Analytics Frost & Sullivan notes that the primary trends driving the customer care industry in the past three years have continued unabated in 2019 and the first half of 2020: The adoption of cloud as standard; the continuing move toward omnichannel delivery in the context of digital transformation; and a focus by providers on developing solutions that address the needs of a changing workforce have been top of mind, forcing companies to innovate even faster to remain competitive. Speed to deliver new functionality even faster has been further impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic as almost overnight millions of contact center agents had to convert to a work-at-home model, forcing customers to rethink their cloud and application strategies. 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 and has become more important due to the pandemic. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the contact center has moved front and center as the industry has matured past using AI in point solutions, such as virtual assistants and bots, to being infused across the customer contact landscape. Tying this together is that the customer and employee experience are intrinsically entwined, meaning solution providers need to cater equally to both in the development and marketing of customer care solutions. The market for contact center solutions has become broad and complex with dozens of options across contact center systems, cloud, and business process outsourcing providers. 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 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. Author: Nancy Jamison