New analysis from Frost & Sullivan's Information & Communication Technologies program presents some of the trends that Frost & Sullivan believes will shape, grow, and influence customer contact and the customer experience in the next few years, and includes insights for selected industries, business models, and technology areas, including: • Inbound contact routing • Interactive voice response • Automated self-service and conversational AI • Outbound dialing, campaign management, compliance, and risk mitigation • Workforce management and performance management • Call recording • Analytics Frost & Sullivan notes that the primary trends driving the customer care industry in the past 4 years have continued unabated in 2020 and the first half of 2021, with new trends appearing as the result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The adoption of cloud as standard accelerated through movement to work-at-home models. Omnichannel delivery in the context of digital transformation and a provider focus on developing solutions that address the needs of a changing workforce also remain top of mind, forcing companies to innovate even faster to remain competitive. The COVID-19 pandemic has had an effect on the delivery speed of new functionality and has resulted in a slight change of investment priorities. 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 because of the pandemic. Artificial intelligence in the contact center is getting an infusion of investment, resulting in many product and solution launches, such as virtual assistants and bots, conversational AI, and process automation, in the contact center and across business functions. Overlaying all of this is the driving focus on improving customer and employee experiences, which are intrinsically entwined. 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 the list of vendors to consider 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 including 8x8, Amazon Web Services, Alvaria, Atos Unify, AT&T, Avaya, Bell Canada, Bright Pattern, Calabrio, CallMiner, Cisco, Coredial, Dialpad, Edify, Enghouse, Five9, Genesys, Lifesize, LiveVox, Lumen, Lumenvox, Mitel, NICE, Numonix, Onvisource, RingCentral, Sharpen, Talkdesk, TCN, Thrio, TTEC, Verint, Verizon Business, and Vonage. Author: Nancy Jamison