Meeting demand

Call and contact centre technologies are big business. Despite a difficult trading environment for many businesses, investments continue to be made in the customer service space. Gartner estimates that spending on call and contact centres will reach $47 billion in 2028, with much of that driven by both provider technology innovation and customer service demand.

This is a market that is reaching maturity, with many features and capabilities now core to any call and contact centre solution. Omnichannel capabilities are by and large at the top of that list of must-haves.

“As a minimum, every contact centre proposition should have omnichannel capabilities,” explained Graham Kedzlie, director of voice sales, PXC. “Consumers today want to transact via text, e-mail, chat, phone, social media and so on, so it’s unsurprising that WhatsApp integration is one of the fastest growing ways of interacting within contact centres.

“More advanced offerings can enable you to pivot between video, chat and phone – beneficial to a large subset of sectors. For example, insurance companies can now speak to customers in real time but switch calls to video to visually enhance claims and speed up processes that were previously paper based.”

Businesses are aware that customers expect to be able to get in touch in a way that suits them. Jon Zoltie, contact center specialist, AudioCodes, said, “Omnichannel is on the rise across different industries and regions. Customers today expect to be able to reach a business on their terms. Failure to provide flexibility of communication methods means you’re failing to meet expectations.” 

Richard Howson, partner account manager, Evolve IP, agreed with that perspective. He said, “Having an omnichannel presence is now becoming paramount. It’s about providing customers with access to multiple forms of communication, regardless of what platform or device is being used, to deliver immediate responses. It’s much more than just speaking on a phone call like in the past.

“Social media interaction, webchat, email, voice, WhatsApp and text all need to come back to a single agent who can then communicate in the best way possible, to enhance the overall customer experience. It’s about facilitating where the customers are and how they want to communicate with your business.”

John McKindland, head of partner channel in the UK, Sona Business, added, “Customer choice is king and that doesn’t always mean picking up the phone and calling. There’s still value in talking to a human but the omnichannel approach is taking over.”

Fluctuating demand

This move to omnichannel can bring broader benefits for businesses and organisations. Adam Wilson, strategic partner director for EMEA, Vonage, said, “The demand for omnichannel isn’t just coming from the customer side – it’s also coming from businesses. Omnichannel communications help businesses meet spikes in demand when a huge influx of customer queries come in at once.

“For some of the businesses we work with, this might be due to holiday periods – for others, it might be due to an incident affecting their customers.” 

He pointed to a particular use case with a charity customer. Wilson said, “One organisation we work with, RSPCA, relies on its phone line to help individuals experiencing animal welfare issues. During lockdown, the charity was flooded with queries from people looking for information about how to help their pets adapt to their new circumstances. RSPCA was able to open a new web chat offering to help manage the influx of queries. This is a great example of the growing need for omnichannel to meet demand.”

Consistent communications

Once that omnichannel approach is in place, the next demand is for consistency across all channels. Martin Taylor, co-founder and deputy CEO, Content Guru, said, “Today’s consumers expect to engage with organisations on their own terms, whether that’s through voice, email, chat, SMS, or social media, making omni-channel capabilities essential in a modern contact centre solution. 

“These capabilities imply a move to the cloud. An integrated omnichannel platform allows agents to manage all interactions in one place, ensuring consistent communication and enabling a more personalised service, whilst generating the consistent data organisations need to power their AI services.

“The ability to move effortlessly between channels during a customer interaction without losing context improves efficiency and delivers better customer satisfaction.”

Vonage’s Wilson argued that consistency can be achieved by integrating call and contact centre technologies with customer relationship management (CRM) systems. He said, “CRM integration is a crucial feature of any call and contact centre solution, allowing customer data to be shared across the organisation. This data can then be used to improve customer experience.

“For instance, when a customer calls an organisation for the second or third time, the agent might be told that this customer has historically provided negative feedback on their call experience. The agent can then pass this caller onto a more experienced team member or leverage a subject matter expert, to help them deliver better customer service and hopefully achieve a better outcome from the call.”

Jeff Green, CEO, Elisha Telecom, added, “Customers don’t want to have to explain themselves repeatedly – hence why having all interactions in one platform is so important, allowing agents to scrutinise previous interaction information in one window. Furthermore, customers want the same positive experience in every interaction, making consistency key.

“This is why managers must have the ability to examine as many interactions as possible, even at scale, to surface best practices and potential areas for improvement.”

Actionable insights

Automation is also helping business leaders to better understand what is happening in their contact centres. Greg Easton, head of business development, Tollring, said, “Automation plays a crucial role in reducing staff frustration and turnover by eliminating mundane, repetitive tasks. For example, automating the process of listening to and evaluating call recordings not only makes the job less tedious but also helps uncover valuable insights at scale.

“AI-powered analysis of call recordings is already in use, enabling organisations to identify the most important calls, assess the quality of their customer service, and even gain insights into how their proposition is received or how customers feel about their competitors.”

For Chris Angus, vice president for contact centre engagement, 8x8, the best way to describe the current driver in the market is consolidation. He said, “This has been an incredible period for the evolution of the contact centre toolkit for both agents and managers or supervisors. People now expect to not only be able to work from anywhere but have full functionality wherever they go.

“They now expect, as standard, literally being able to maintain CRM integrations and data whilst being on the road or working with AI driven conversational analysis from a UC mobile app and accessing their contact centre’s sophisticated call routing rules. 

“If I had to sum it up though, I would say it’s about consolidation. While people want more from their tools, they want to be able to do it with fewer tools. Companies want that single pane of glass to provide a 360-degree view of how a customer is being treated. It’s about presenting a unified experience to help deal with large volumes of queries.”

Remote work

As is the trend in the broader business community, call and contact centres are increasingly adopting hybrid working policies. This is shaping the evolution of the solutions available to businesses, with the ability to work remotely now front-of-mind for decision-makers. 

Joel Chimoindes, CEO, Nuvias UC, said, “Traditionally, contact centres were large offices with rows of people seated at workstations or booths, handling call after call. However, with the continuous advancement of cloud technology, there has been a significant shift toward remote work. Many contact centres are now adopting hybrid models, where agents can work from various locations while still having full access to the same tools and data as if they were in a physical office.”

Chimoindes added that video capabilities are also key to future development. He said, “In our industry, we know that resolving issues and understanding emotions and body language is often easier over video. As a result, we’re increasingly seeing interactions escalate to video calls via platforms like Microsoft Teams or Zoom, leading to better customer experiences.”

For any businessIn recent years, access to call and contact centre solutions has been opened up, with a broader range of businesses now making the most of the capabilities available to them. Myles Leach, managing director, NFON UK, said, “People get quite nervous about the title contact centre. It conjures preconceived images of the classic call centre. Big soulless rooms full of agents wearing headsets, and everything is complex and difficult. But that’s not what a cloud contact centre is – it can be much more informal.

“A small business can now make use of technology that was traditionally very expensive, and they don’t need to have a big CX estate behind it – they might only need one, two or three agents who could be working from home. It makes it a very financially achievable solution.”

Simon Horton, vice president of international sales, Sangoma, added, “When a typical managing director of an SMB thinks of a contact centre, they picture a vast office, filled with hundreds of call agents. Yet any SMB handling inbound customer calls can be considered an informal call centre. 

“Many SMBs now realise that any customer calls they lose equals lost revenue. But the average small business cannot afford the large scale contact centre offerings that the large players offer. Unified communications offerings can give SMBs the power to handle customer calls in a way that we all expect whilst enabling flexibility to their staff and offering the management team the capability to view exactly how incoming calls are being handled.”

Horton described this improved accessibility of previously enterprise-grade capabilities as a “trickle down of features”. He said, “We see the trickle down of features that used to solely be in the large call centre space to the informal call centre.  More SMBs are demanding these features without the price tag they’ve been used to for the last few years.”

This lower barrier of entry for call and contact centre solutions is down to reduced costs; how those reduced costs are achieved is important.

For Easton, from Tollring, this can be done through self-service and automation, but providers need to be smart about how they do that. He said, “While the continual enhancement of solutions remains a key objective, it must be balanced with the drive to reduce costs. However, self-service and automation capabilities should be applied thoughtfully and strategically, rather than simply as blunt tools for cost reduction.

“When misused, they can lead to the opposite effect, resulting in dissatisfied customers and frustrated staff due to a poor overall experience.”

The third wave

For Kedzlie, from PXC, this is the third wave of the evolution of call and contact centres. He said, “I think we are now embarking on the third wave of contact centre evolution. Wave one was on-premises contact centres then, in wave two we saw the emergence of over-the-top providers, predominantly from the US, offering CX solutions with multiple silos residing in the cloud. 

“Finally, in wave three we are seeing single platform vendors offering a native solution with all functionalities built in and accessible via one user interface. Zoom’s own platform offers Zoom Phone and CX, which uniquely marries up front office and back-office workers to offer a smoother experience for the customer and agent.

“In this third wave, we’re seeing vendors from waves one and two struggling to keep up with the speed of innovation and the cost to keep relevant. PXC works with Zoom exclusively, who is investing significantly in research and development, and launched hundreds of new features across their platform. Their roadmap is aggressive with AI at the forefront of everything they do.”

Jonathan Maher, head of contact centre specialists, Avaya Europe, added, “The need to deliver not just for customers but employees must be central to solution evolution. By unifying existing on-premises communications capabilities with new cloud-powered AI innovations into a single agent desktop, agents can deliver superior customer experiences more efficiently.

“New developments should be guided by valuable customer insights and serve to enrich the entire spectrum of the customer journey. Today’s solutions need to deliver better experiences for both employees and customers.”

Finding opportunities 

So, what opportunities can be found in the UK? Angus, from 8x8, said, “While many are focusing on the negative and the economic conditions of the moment – which aren’t great, let’s be honest – there is plenty of opportunity out there. First up, there’s the PSTN delay. While that may have been shoved back to 2027, that doesn’t mean companies can’t be taking advantage of the delay to inform and educate businesses about moving sooner rather than later. 

“This also ties in nicely with moving towards the cloud and the idea of taking on board as-a-service options. Channel companies moving towards as-a-service are in a position to completely transform the options for customers. It’s an option to increase the chance of securing increased new revenues by selling UCaaS, CCaaS, CPaaS and AI on one single platform.”

Angus added that channel partners who have previously offered on premise, or Capex models, are now able to offer their customers the opportunity to stay with them as their chosen partner but switch to an opex-as-a-service vendor within their portfolio. This can help keep them as a customer whilst reducing the risk of them looking elsewhere.Tapping into the “informal contact centre” market is also mentioned by many stakeholders.

Jack Michalski, director of channel partnerships, +, said, “The informal contact centre market represents a significant opportunity for providers. The[se organisations] may not seek a traditional contact centre solution but still require a solution that enables them to handle multiple calls at once, show call queues and integrate with CRM systems.”

Chimoindes, from Nuvias UC, added, “Customer experience is at the core of every business. Even if companies do not identify themselves as having a contact centre, they still need to deliver a certain level of service and require a platform to facilitate this. Untapped opportunities exist within SMBs that may not see themselves as having a traditional contact centre but could benefit from support in enhancing their overall customer experience.”

Winning offerings

There are many opportunities in this space, but developing a competitive and compelling offering for your customer base will still be critical. Taylor, from Content Guru, explained that one approach could be to offer complementary services. 

He said, “Successful resellers differentiate themselves by going beyond the core contact-centre-as-a-service platform, by offering complementary services such as workforce optimisation, customer data analytics, and integration with systems like CRM, back-office UC or other IT infrastructure.

“These added services help resellers and MSPs become trusted advisors, delivering end-to-end solutions that address strategic business needs now and in the future.”

Another good starting point is to look at what your customers need to achieve, and develop an offering from there. Maher, from Avaya Europe, said, “Resellers and MSPs must be able to map what the end-customer wants to achieve against the best way to get there. This takes in-depth knowledge of the customer and of the available technologies and how they can work together to deliver the desired results. Our most successful partners are those who listen to customers and work with us on solution-building.”

Leach, from NFON UK, added, “The ability to deliver a great customer experience is something that every business should be striving for but not all end-user customers are at the same starting point. So, go with the needs of your customer base first and they start looking at how you can develop net new from there. Having a solution that is also standalone is important.

“For example, our CCaaS offering, Contact Center Hub, can be deployed independently from our UCaaS product, Cloudya, and can integrate with the customer’s existing telephony platform. From a change management and deployment-of-new-technology perspective this is very attractive as a business doesn’t need to change their existing communications infrastructure.”

The channel was built on resellers and MSPs acting as trusted advisors for their customers, and that ability to provide advice and guidance can light the path to success in the call and contact centre space as well.

Kedzlie, from PXC, said, “The market is evolving at such a rapid pace that consumers may feel overwhelmed and not fully understand which technologies they should be investing in. The Channel can elevate themselves by becoming trusted advisors. As part of this, it will be important to demonstrate real life use cases, demo environments, offering clear or simplified enablement programmes and structured transition paths towards these new technologies. 

“As a wholesale provider, we aim to offer the Channel everything they need to succeed as they take these solutions from us through thorough onboarding, pre-sale and in-service support.”

The march of AI

In terms of the capabilities that are yet to come in the contact centre market, AI was the phrase on everyone’s lips. Wilson, from Vonage, pointed out the reality that this is not new territory.

He said, “Artificial intelligence is the latest buzzword, but AI has been in contact centres for years before ChatGPT came into the mainstream. Conversational AI is core to any call or contact centre solution, most commonly in the form of a virtual assistant who can answer simple questions or triage to a human agent.”

Yet AI and its capabilities are certainly opening doors for providers. Angus, from 8x8, said, “AI represents a huge opportunity for the channel to increase customer satisfaction and revenue streams. AI and automation present lucrative opportunities for partners to develop advice and offerings that can drive innovative solutions, create operational efficiency, enhance customer experience and generate new revenue streams.”

The Channel can help businesses bring AI into their contact centres in a delicate way. Zoltie, from AudioCodes, explained this could mean ensuring AI helps agents before it is experienced by customers. He added, “Leaders need to start with practical use cases for AI.”