InsightaaS: As the world evolves away from person-to-person voice conversations as a primary means of connection/collaboration, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that corporations invest hundreds of billions (with a “B”!) in contact centres each year, and that these operations are in turn evolving to keep pace with changes in both technology options and user behaviour.
Today’s featured post reflects the perspective of an analyst with Nemertes Research, a “women-owned…research-advisory and strategic-consulting firm that specializes in analyzing and quantifying the business value of emerging technologies.” It provides a view of how the 2015 market will differ from 2014 and past years. Truthfully, on review of the post, it seems that contact centre market change is more evolutionary than revolutionary, and that predictions for ‘change’ in 2015 primarily reflect continuations of trends seen in 2014. With that said, though, the post provides useful perspective on the contact centre market as a whole. Looking at trends like cloud and mobility in isolation, it’s easy to focus on their disruptive potential – but it’s quite another thing to locate these options within a multi-billion dollar industry and then evaluate their effect on many companies and vast numbers of employees. The featured post is helpful in connecting the potential for technology-enabled change with the responses required from industry when these changes impact customers and the competitive environment. Cloud, mobility, social, analytics and omnichannel are buzzwords for suppliers and the media; they are business realities in the call centre space, and seeing the pace and direction of their impact helps to weld the hype associated with them to the market use cases that prove their worth.
It’s a new year, and that means it’s time to take a look at what happened in the contact center space in 2014 and where it’s going in 2015. Contact center industry analysts, IT leaders, and service providers had a lot of ideas about where things were headed in 2014; some of these have panned out while others have busted. Let’s take a look at the past, present, and future of five key topics in contact center:
1. Cloud – 2014 was accurately predicted to be a year of growth for cloud contact center offerings and OPEX-based deployment models. It did not, however, prove to be the year when every company rushed to put its entire contact center in the cloud. Will this happen in 2015? My prediction: cloud deployments will certainly increase, but I still don’t see a huge rush to puteverything in the cloud.
Hybrid deployments that offer the security of redundancy will likely push more organizations with large contact centers into looking into and even making formal plans to put at least some of their contact center applications in the cloud…
Read the entire post on the Nemertes website: Link
