Digitization and Cloud Migration Transforming Asia-Pacific Contact Center Applications Market, Forecast to 2026

The Asia-Pacific (APAC) contact center applications market registered growth of 5.8% to reach $719.5 million in 2019. Technology up-gradation, cloud migration, and adoption of new technologies such as analytics, automation, and self-service applications are driving market growth. Frost & Sullivan expects the APAC contact center applications market to experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.3% during the forecast period of 2019 to 2026.

An escalating number of organizations in APAC recognize customer experience (CX) as key to enhancing customer life-cycle value. Automation and analytics are increasingly popular value additions for contact centers. With changing consumer behavior, customer contact continues to evolve, from traditional voice-based interactions to seamless customer journeys that are proactive, interactive, and persistent.

Application vendors are introducing new technologies into their product portfolios, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), self-service automation, chatbots, robotic process automation (RPA), and real-time analytics, to help contact centers enhance customer satisfaction, increase first-call resolution, improve customer loyalty, and boost overall operational efficiency.

This study is part of a research service on the Asia-Pacific contact center applications market that covers 14 countries: Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. The applications discussed are segmented into six service types: inbound contact routing (ICR) systems, interactive voice response (IVR) systems, outbound dialer (OBD) systems, quality monitoring (QM) systems, workforce management (WFM) systems, and contact center analytics systems.

The COVID-19 pandemic has compelled almost all contact centers in the region to opt for the work-at-home-agents (WAHA) delivery model. The pandemic accelerated the migration to a cloud/hybrid setup and created opportunities for solutions that support a bigger WAHA base, self-service bots, and AI-enabled tools.

Moreover, the pandemic induced a high volume of customer interactions with limited resources, which compelled contact centers to invest in cloud-based knowledge management tools that help them optimize knowledge creation, dissemination, and utilization. Enterprises are increasingly looking to source end-to-end analytics solutions from their primary contact center infrastructure or workforce optimization vendor. Robotic process automation, Big Data, and Internet of Things (IoT) solutions will drive growth.

This report analyzes the overall contact center applications market for APAC during the base year 2019 and provides forecasts until 2026. Analysis covers demand-side revenue by contact center size (<50 seats, 50–200 seats, and >200 seats). All revenue and market share figures represent Frost & Sullivan estimates, based on primary and secondary research and analysis. Any previous year’s market size and market share estimates, if revised, are updated in this study.