While most companies in the Asia-Pacific region are expected to explore the Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) model, many of them would look for ways to increase the returns on their investment from their existing infrastructures. These companies are likely to adopt hybrid solutions, as established system vendors start offering more deployment options. The contact center market will continue to shift from systems toward cloud solutions. Solution providers will need to focus on clearly articulating upgrade strategies and life cycle road maps that will allow for the provision of effective omnichannel customer support.

Integrating new contact channels (e.g., mobile contact, chat, and social media) and developing omnichannel customer experience strategies will be the top drivers that will encourage companies to move to the cloud. In this regard, interactive voice response (IVR) will be of significant interest. Although many had predicted the demise of IVR, it is still a growing channel that is acquiring new capabilities, such as text response, speech enablement, and application in virtual assistant scenarios.

Contact center analytics is expected to be a strong growth area for most vendors. Enterprises are increasingly seeking to source end-to-end analytics solutions from their primary contact center infrastructure or workforce optimization vendors. Newer options such as robotic process automation, Big Data, and the Internet of Things (IoT) will continue to drive growth during the forecast period.

This study is on contact centers that are hosted or in the cloud. A hosted contact center is a network-based contact center service, whereby the service provider hosts the contact center infrastructure and leases out the functionalities, applications, and features to end users. Cloud-based contact centers refer to the provision of contact center functionalities, such as voice and applications, through an ’as a service’ model. The solution is delivered over the Internet from a multi-tenant infrastructure owned by a service provider.

Japanese organizations are less price-sensitive and willing to pay a premium price for advanced features. Finance and teleshopping are major verticals in the Japanese hosted contact center services market. eCommerce has also recorded vibrant demand growth in this market.