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 by Information Services Group (ISG) (Nasdaq: III), a leading global technology research and advisory firm.
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“CCaaS providers are helping businesses reach customers whether the customer prefers email, text, a messaging app or social media.”
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.
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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 8×8, 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.