New entrants, M&A and other factors are reshaping contact center as a service (CCaaS), which is experiencing massive growth.

The global CCaaS software market is expected to reach $37.2 billion by 2027, up from $24.3 billion last year, according to Report Consultant.

Organizations’ (SMB and enterprise) demands for a CCaaS solution are growing because customer expectations have significantly changed over the past few years, said Corey Cohen, TBI‘s vice president of marketing.

TBI’s Corey Cohen

“Customers are expecting near real-time responses to questions, inquiries, suggestions and concerns,” she said. “As an example, if you put your customer hat on, when disgruntled with an airline, we all know the quickest way to a response is through Twitter. A customer wants you to know who they are before answering a question with very little info put in, and once a question is asked, purchase history or profiles you’ve set up with the company should be pulled automatically for greater context.”

Customers are driving the enhancements of features and benefits to CCaaS platforms in terms of reporting, employee onboarding and workforce optimization, Cohen said. These are critical value-adds for CCaaS providers, she said.

Within the CCaaS industry specifically, it isn’t so much M&A activity that’s shaking it up as new market entrants like AWS and Twilio, standalone CCaaS-type products including cloud collaboration and meeting products, she said.

“I read there are over 100 CCaaS providers currently, up 20% from last year,” Cohen said. “Gartner predicts that 15-20% of UCaaS providers will exit the market by 2021. What will that do to the CCaaS market and players as many UCaaS providers have contact center capabilities?”

AppSmart’s Vince Bradley

Acquisitions and integrated partnerships/offerings do hold significant value as often UCaaS is a door opener to contact center sales, she said.

Getting the omnichannel experience right so that it’s very easy to communicate by their channel of preference between voice, text, webchat and email is an ongoing challenge for providers, said Vince Bradley, AppSmart‘s co-CEO.

Anyone that has a CPaaS offering is who TBI considers top tier at this point, Cohen said.

Scroll through our gallery below for 10 of the latest trends shaping CCaaS.