North America’s contact center market will show steady growth in the coming years, with cloud contact center exceeding $5 billion by 2023.

That’s according to a new analysis by Frost & Sullivan. Higher adoption of hybrid solutions will help the market maintain growth momentum at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.3%.

The contact center systems market also will grow 2.9%, reaching $1.7 billion.

As the shift from systems to cloud continues, traditional market share leaders such as NICE inContact, Verint and Noble Systems continue to increase their share as they offer hosted/cloud solutions of their own, according to Frost & Sullivan. Total market share is difficult to determine because while some vendors provide cloud solutions directly, they also sell through cloud partners who then get credit for those solutions in their own cloud market share numbers, rather than that revenue being attributed to the OEM supplier, it said.

Frost and Sullivan’s Nancy Jamison

“Contact center vendors need to position themselves to capitalize on greenfield opportunities, while still catering to their large installed bases of premises products,” said Nancy Jamison, Frost & Sullivan’s principal analyst of information and communication technologies. “Strong focus areas driving growth include workforce engagement and the infusion of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions across the customer contact landscape.”

The addition of new channels, replacement of aging infrastructure and integration of new functionality in the cloud with existing premises systems increased revenues in the cloud contact center market by 12.5% in 2018. Contact center analytics, quality monitoring and recording were particularly strong growth drivers as companies sought to make the most of their existing investments.

“Pure-play cloud providers continue to expand offerings at a rapid pace, while traditional contact center systems suppliers have been adding cloud offerings,” Jamison said. “Companies are looking to differentiate themselves through AI-enhanced self-service applications, workforce engagement management and enriched analytics offerings.”

In addition to offering self-service options for customers and contact center employees, vendors will find greater growth opportunities by: focusing on process transformation and top-down cross-organizational support that drive business benefits; refining an architecture that fills gaps in omnichannel customer experience (CX) by chaining pods of metadata; and embedding gamification across agent tool sets to provide training and insights into performance.

Other growth opportunities include: deploying new agent desktops with intuitive, step-saving interfaces and greater access to information; incorporating AI in non-customer-facing apps, including workforce management (WFM), routing, and outbound dialing; and designing hosted solutions to provide the same functionality as on-premises applications.