Enterprises Across the Globe Embrace Contact-Center-as-a-Service to Meet Customer Needs

ISG Provider Lens™ report sees CCaaS providers offering AI- and analytics-based services to improve customer experience

Enterprises across the global are seeking support from contact-center-as-a-service providers to meet rising customer service expectations resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report published today by Information Services Group (ISG) (Nasdaq: III), a leading global technology research and advisory firm.

The 2021 ISG Provider Lens™ Contact Center as a Service – CX Global Report finds enterprises worldwide are looking to contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) providers to help them reach and retain customers who increasingly are using digital channels to engage with companies.

“Retail shopping has gone digital, physical restaurants have offered online or contactless ordering, and doctors have embraced telehealth services during the pandemic,” said Jan Erik Aase, partner and global leader, ISG Provider Lens Research. “CCaaS providers are helping businesses reach customers whether the customer prefers email, text, a messaging app or social media.”

As effects from the pandemic continue, CCaaS providers and their clients have turned to hybrid or remote working models to respond to customer inquiries, the report says. With these models becoming the new standard, companies are looking to adopt cloud contact centers to enable working from home for the long term.

CCaaS solutions deliver several benefits, the report says. They are easy to deploy and integrate with other applications and systems, they offer high scalability, and they provide pricing flexibility. In addition, these services support multiple channels of communication, including voice, chat, email, social media, video and messaging apps.

In addition, the report sees the CCaaS model evolving and offering much more than basic customer communication. Cloud contact centers are now designed as full-blown customer service solutions with multiple features, including workforce management, while deploying technologies such as AI, automation and analytics.

Continuous advancements in AI have led to CCaaS providers embracing the technology, the report says. In many cases, an AI-powered bot is able to determine the need for human intervention and handle skill-based routing based on customer needs. Cloud contact center providers are heavily investing in AI to boost their portfolios of solutions.

Providers are also heavily focused on workforce management, with the goal of ensuring high-quality outcomes, the report says. Most CCaaS providers are investing in such workforce management capabilities as speech analytics, supervision features, real-time coaching functionality, and gamification. These capabilities enable businesses to virtually maintain engagement levels with their employees.

Finally, the report sees CCaaS providers starting to pay more attention to agent experience, the report adds. Providers are investing in building comprehensive agent dashboards with built-in analytic functionalities and insights, enabling agents to deliver smarter and better results. These products include improved user interfaces, training, coaching, and analytics-led insights.

The 2021 ISG Provider Lens™ Contact Center as a Service – CX Global Report evaluates the capabilities of 16 providers in one quadrant: Contact Center as a Service.

The report names 8x8, Five9, Genesys, NICE inContact, Odigo and Talkdesk as Leaders in the quadrant.

In addition, Amazon Connect and Content Guru were named Rising Stars—a companies with “promising portfolios” and “high future potential” by ISG’s definition—in the quadrant.

A customized version of the report is available from Odigo.

The 2021 ISG Provider Lens™ Contact Center as a Service – CX Global Report is available to subscribers or for one-time purchase on this webpage.

About ISG Provider Lens™ Research

The ISG Provider Lens™ Quadrant research series is the only service provider evaluation of its kind to combine empirical, data-driven research and market analysis with the real-world experience and observations of ISG's global advisory team. Enterprises will find a wealth of detailed data and market analysis to help guide their selection of appropriate sourcing partners, while ISG advisors use the reports to validate their own market knowledge and make recommendations to ISG's enterprise clients. The research currently covers providers offering their services globally, across Europe, as well as in the U.S., Germany, Switzerland, the U.K., France, the Nordics, Brazil and Australia/New Zealand, with additional markets to be added in the future. For more information about ISG Provider Lens research, please visit this webpage.

A companion research series, the ISG Provider Lens Archetype reports, offer a first-of-its-kind evaluation of providers from the perspective of specific buyer types.

About ISG

ISG (Information Services Group) (Nasdaq: III) is a leading global technology research and advisory firm. A trusted business partner to more than 700 clients, including more than 75 of the world’s top 100 enterprises, ISG is committed to helping corporations, public sector organizations, and service and technology providers achieve operational excellence and faster growth. The firm specializes in digital transformation services, including automation, cloud and data analytics; sourcing advisory; managed governance and risk services; network carrier services; strategy and operations design; change management; market intelligence and technology research and analysis. Founded in 2006, and based in Stamford, Conn., ISG employs more than 1,300 digital-ready professionals operating in more than 20 countries—a global team known for its innovative thinking, market influence, deep industry and technology expertise, and world-class research and analytical capabilities based on the industry’s most comprehensive marketplace data. For more information, visit www.isg-one.com.

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