Contact Center in the Cloud 2021 Value Index - Ventana Research

Contact Center in the Cloud

The modern age of customer experience requires organizations to ensure that the journey of their engagement across any channel and device is orchestrated effectively. Organizations, no matter if they are focused on inbound or outbound interactions, have relied on contact centers to fulfill operational and revenue objectives. Now, the utilization of cloud computing has enabled a new generation of applications and technology to more easily support this imperative through products that in the recent past had to be purchased and installed in an enterprise.

Contact centers are transitioning their essential infrastructures from on-premise technology to cloud-based platforms. This shift has been under way for more than a decade, but has reached a tipping point — there is now an assumption among technology suppliers and buyers that the cloud is the fundamental delivery mode for interaction handling, agent management and other operational processes around customer service and support.

The challenge in providing business continuity required new investments that enable organizations to respond rapidly to dramatic changes in interaction volume and staffing crisis that saw agents required to work from home.

This transition has not been easy for vendors or the organizations that rely on their products. The 2020 pandemic increased the adoption of cloud-based contact centers and applications used by organizations. The challenge in providing business continuity required new investments that enable organizations to respond rapidly to dramatic changes in interaction volume and the staffing crisis that saw agents required to work from home. Even with plans for a return to work, organizations are looking to continue supporting more hybrid-operated contact centers.

Prior to the pandemic, progress toward cloud adoption was incremental. Vendors had difficult choices to make in the 2010s. Many legacy companies were caught in the bind of needing to sustain the revenue stream from lucrative long-term on-premises clients while at the same time defending their customers from cloud-only contact center technology providers that were not burdened by existing infrastructure. Many of these older established contact center providers with decades of standing and large customer bases were slow to adapt their product portfolios to the new reality of cloud computing. In recent years, however, those vendors have taken dramatic steps to reprioritize cloud development and reframe their value positions in the marketplace, with great success.