The contact center as a service market is shifting. Customers’ demands are changing and newer companies are giving established CCaaS providers a run for their money.

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted many organizations to move from centralized contact center operations to distributed, cloud-based ones. This has accelerated widespread demand for CCaaS.

George Aldea is a partner sales engineer at AppSmart. He said 2019 saw about 10% of contact centers deployed in the cloud.

AppSmart’s George Aldea

“By 2022, industry experts expect that to grow to 50%,” he said. “Customers preferr to get involved with speech interfaces and chatbots. The SMB market is driving deployments of CCaaS across industry lines.”

The CCaaS market is demanding a simple-to-deploy-and-use offering with easy-to-learn agent/management training that is affordable, Aldea said.

“We are seeing Vonage, RingCentral, Five9, 8×8 and Nice InContact all dedicating large amounts of their development resources to meet the demand,” he said.

Customers Demand More

Brandon Knight is Telarus’ vice president of business development for contact center. He said the definition of cutting-edge, successful CCaaS providers is evolving.

Telarus’ Brandon Knight

“And it is because customer expectations are changing/evolving as well,” he said. “Customers are demanding a better experience. Their expectation is the agent answering the phone has access to all the tools necessary to resolve their issue quickly.”

In the past, “cutting edge” for CCaaS market providers meant you could blend outbound with inbound calls and maybe route emails to agents, Knight said.

“Those are table stakes now,” he said. “Cutting edge involves a complete omnichannel customer-handling experience along with self-service via mobile applications and AI to predict and respond to customer needs.”

Keith Dawson is principal analyst of customer experience and commerce for 451 Research/S&P Global Market Intelligence. He said mobile devices have been the biggest driver in terms of changing customer expectations.

451 Research’s Keith Dawson

“It opens the door to a variety of different kinds of contact,” he said. “It’s not always by voice. It could be through app or text, or through a variety of different communications modes. And that in turn has changed the calculus for the contact center system buyer who now needs to focus as much on alternatives to the voice channel as on the voice channel itself.”

In 2005, all you had to do was provide a voice call connection and maybe an interactive voice response (IVR) on your front end with a certain number of agents and a switch to turn them on, Dawson said.

“Now these providers, because they’re taking on more of the environment within the center, have to provide things like workforce optimization and a lot more analytics, and a lot of things that,” he said.

Pandemic Impact

The pandemic has changed the mix of what people are looking for in the short and mid-term, Dawson said.

“The short term is kind of triage and trying to make sure that your operations can continue to run smoothly,” he said. “I think a lot of it will depend on how long this goes and where we are later in this year’s budgeting cycle and into early 2021 before we really have a sense of what the midterm buying situation looks like.”

Based on feedback from analysts and experts, and recent news reports, we’ve compiled a list, in alphabetical order, of 20 noteworthy CCaaS market providers. They’re making the most of the current competitive landscape and charting success.

The list offers a mix of well-known providers and lesser-known companies that are making big strides in CCaaS. It also includes companies that are making a splash in the market while not offering a complete CCaaS solution.