The annual report covers vendors that provide equipment, software and services to operate contact centres used for customer, employee and service support, including outbound telemarketing, helpdesks and other structured communications operations.
The Gartner report outlines the types of interactions, requirements and dominant architectures for supporting effective contact centres today, noting that a wide range of functions, architectures, features and services are needed. The types of services are people-assisted and self-service, which can be supported by a number of channels such as interactive self-service, speech recognition, voice, Web chat, email, instant messaging, social media, video and mobile devices.
The Gartner report also found that contact centre managers increasingly prefer to purchase much, or all, of their contact centre infrastructure from a single source in the effort to simplify integration and operations, which bodes well for those infrastructure vendors offering complete portfolios of solutions comprised of their own products and those of partners and other strategic suppliers. In addition, cloud-based, contact centre as a service (CCaaS) models for hosted, multitenant systems are gaining attention but not yet widely deployed.
Mark de la Vega, vice president, Contact Center Solutions, Avaya commented “Too many businesses are serving today’s consumers using yesterday’s technology out of fear that an IT disruption will negatively affect their service operations. The reality is that they may already be risking customer relationships through inconvenient, high effort experiences. Avaya Customer Experience Management solutions offer an end-to-end portfolio of solutions that minimize disruption while enabling mobile, multichannel interactions and providing new, actionable insights into consumer behaviour which help build loyalty, brand and revenue.”