Contact Center Opimization (Review Report)

DATAMONITOR VIEW

CATALYST

SUMMARY

METHODOLOGY

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Introduction

The Market For Contact Center Optimization Technologies (Market Focus)

Surviving The Optimization Evolution (Strategy Focus)

Contact Center Optimization Technologies (Technology Focus)

Summary

The WOTs market continues to evolve and broaden to include more holistic optimization technologies

Vendors seek to offer increased depth and breadth of functionality through multi- component solution offerings

Product integration is needed if the benefits of a WOTs deployment are to be fully realized

Strategic partnerships are essential for vendors unable to follow an acquisition strategy

Demand for customer-centric contact centers drives continued growth across the component types

Strong growth in WFM as adoption becomes more widespread

QM growth driven by speech analytics and 100% recording

The broadening scope of agent analytics stimulates demand for a more encompassing contact center analytics approach

Demand for broader functionality drives growth for eCoaching delivered to agent desktops

Vendors widen their sales focus as the high-end contact center market starts to saturate

Sales structures must reflect the broad range of contact center types to fully access opportunities for growth

The size of CCs adopting WOTs is gradually shrinking. While large centers are still a key focus, numerous vendors are now providing solutions specifically aimed at the small to medium CC environment. Therefore vendors looking to target products across a range of CC sizes must develop a sales structure to reflect this strategy. A one size fits all approach will not work in this market. As increasing numbers of vendors target the mid-market they must adopt more of a channel focus and push their products through indirect channels (further discussion of channel strategy can be found in the Strategy Focus paper for this research theme).

Traditional high-end vendors must provide scaled-down solutions if they are to successfully penetrate the mid-market

Technological developments and negative perceptions limit the demand for a hosted services model

Performance management helps contact centers realize value beyond the sum of the components

Integrations, partnerships and consolidation are key drivers toward a complete PM solution

The value of strong partnerships has already been discussed but needs to be reinforced in the case of PM. For PM to be achieved there must be a high degree of integration across the components. Effective partnering not only provides the opportunity to go to market with the full WO product set, but it is necessary to ensure that a PM solution can be deployed as quickly and as painlessly as possible. In essence, integration can provide many of the necessary links to produce a PM solution. Partnership can increase the depth of those links, while consolidation (with appropriate R&D efforts) should provide the equivalent of 100% inter-operability.

Services play a key role in helping contact centers realize value beyond the sum of the components

Individual WOTs components will provide a certain level of ROI; however, a multi-component solution with a service layer will offer far greater value to the CC than the value contributed by the sum of the individual components. For example, a WFM solution achieves a ROI based on more efficient scheduling of agent resources. This can be thought of as the stand-alone ROI from deploying the solution. If WFM is combined with broader contact center analytics its data can be utilized by the analytics solution; delivering a higher level of value from the WFM data. Adding this extra value often proves to be the hardest part of a PM solution deployment. Here services play a key part, enabling the vendor to add experience in the areas of data integration, key performance indicator (KPI) selection, measurement / benchmarking and other complementary solutions.

PM availability across contact centers looks set to increase as integration of components continues

Business-led consulting services continue to gain traction amongst vendors and customers

WOTs vendors add value through professional services, plugging the gap between the business and technology layer

Professional service engagements offer closer teaming opportunities with larger contact center system integrators

Actions

TITLE (STRATEGY FOCUS)

Summary

Best-of-breed and suites are locked in a pointless battle that benefits no one

Consolidation is cooling down

Partnerships are more important than ever

Integration and interoperability are what customers care about

Professional services remain the un-tapped growth market in optimization

Professional services hold the key to broader market education and validation

Access to global organizations will drive growth in previously difficult to enter markets

Refocusing on customers will lead to stronger product and higher growth

Adopters generally follow a development curve in optimization deployments

Size and complexity of CC operations plays a central role in their adoption of optimization solutions

ACTIONS

Educate the market, partner well and sell customer-focused tools for success

TITLE (TECHNOLOGY FOCUS)

Summary

Contact center optimization to improve customer satisfaction is a top priority

IP telephony and the customer centric enterprise are changing the contact center landscape, providing opportunities and challenges for vendors and customers

Broadening the CC landscape requires more holistic optimization tools

An evolving WFO Market sees workforce management vendors extending solutions into the enterprise

Hosted WFM offers a low-cost alternative to premise-based solutions

Short term flexibility is a key requirement

Speech analytics and 100% recording drive growth through additional functionality

100% recording - technology that records every customer-agent• interaction.

Speech Analytics - a technology which allows recorded audio to• be mined for content, which can include speech to text, word spot and emotion detection functionality

Regulatory compliance increases the need to record, monitor and analyze customer interactions

eCoaching modules as part of a broader QM solution increase agent performance

Contact center analytics envelops analytics at both an agent and contact center level

Unified agent desktop applications reduce complexity and facilitate more effective agent/customer interactions.

ACTIONS

Developing customer centric optimization technologies

APPENDIX

Ask the analyst

List of Tables

Table 1: Workforce management market size and growth, 2005-2010

Table 2: Quality Monitoring market size and growth, 2005-2010

List of Figures

Figure 1: Optimizing CC performance is the number one investment priority over the next 3 years

Figure 2: Vendors move toward multi-component offerings to provide breadth and depth of functionality

Figure 3: eCoaching market size and growth, 2005-2010

Figure 4: Top 3 technology investment priorities over the next 12 months

Figure 5: The contact center optimization adoption path

Figure 6: Planned use of technology to enhance business growth

Figure 7: Top 3 technology investment priorities over the next 12 months

Figure 8: Top 3 technology investment priorities over the next 3 years