Executive Summary

Contact Center and Agent Management

In this modern, digital age of customer experience, the journey of engagement across every channel and device must be orchestrated effectively. Organizations, no matter the industry, have inbound and outbound interactions and rely on contact centers to fulfill operational and revenue objectives. The utilization of cloud computing has enabled a new generation of applications and technology that supports this imperative through products that are easier to onboard and utilize than those purchased and installed in the past.

Contact centers have transitioned their essential digital and telephonic infrastructures from on-premises technology to cloud-based platforms.

Contact centers have increasingly transitioned their essential digital and telephonic infrastructures from on-premises technology to cloud-based platforms. This shift has been underway for more than a decade with the assumption among technology suppliers and buyers that the cloud is the deployment method to manage the software and the interactions between agents and customers. However, contact centers in a post-pandemic world need to adopt a hybrid approach that engages an organization’s technology where it operates and in whatever way agents and customers interact with it. As the industry moves away from the binary “cloud vs. on premises” approach into a more realistic, situation-based model, organizations are exploring hybrid deployments that mix cloud and on-premises applications based on each organization’s comfort level.

Contact center providers have adapted their product portfolios to support the new reality of cloud computing and operating in public or private cloud environments. After years of sometimes dramatic steps of prioritized development and acquisitions by technology vendors, the focus on cloud development is now well established. The industry has reached a point where contact center in the cloud, referred commonly as contact center as a service (CCaaS), is the dominant mode of operations for new contact centers and for expansions of older ones. The market landscape of providers has changed significantly as technology vendors with on-premises offerings have developed, migrated or acquired contact center offerings that are aimed at the entire marketplace.

Ventana Research’s assessment of the contact center market has found an expanding portfolio of methods to meet the broader need for customer engagement and experiences across channels and interactions and with applications and devices. This demand has introduced investments and communications platforms in the cloud known as Communications Platforms as a Service (CPaaS) that provide more flexibility in configuration and customization than traditional contact center offerings. Simultaneously, this technology has advanced the need for Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) which supports a broader range of what is referred to as digital communications, including collaboration and video. It is now possible for contact centers to adapt and have the ability to support a more streamlined set of interactions for best possible experiences across customer journeys. Technology vendors in the contact center suite market are either directly offering CPaaS and/or UCaaS support through their own technology that is OEM and embedded, or through a third-party partner.

A balanced approach and evaluation criteria that represents an organization’s needs should be used as the RFI lens for evaluating products.

To deliver a seamless and consistent customer experience, organizations must integrate a broad array of communication channels and share all available information among agents and the workforce. Contact center systems handling interactions must apply the same rules across every platform to maintain context as customers move from channel to channel. Cloud-based applications largely obviate the need for dedicated technical resources with on-premises products, and can be easier, faster and less expensive to deploy.

Organizations assessing improvements to their contact centers have a wide range of capabilities and options to meet their needs. It is less a question of cloud versus on-premises, or public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid, but how it adapts to the processes and needs for best possible experiences and seamless interactions.

A balanced approach and evaluation criteria that represents an organization’s contact center suite needs should be used as the RFI lens for evaluating products. First, organizations should look at the manageability of the broader set of applications and technology required to operate an omnichannel contact center. There is also the need to ensure reliable 24/7 operations to support the level of performance and scalability from the internal operations to the customers interaction. In addition, the contact center must have the adaptability to support the integration of a broad variety of technology, applications, processes and data across channels and departments. The level of usability required across roles and technology in the contact center should be a priority and support the range of usage personas. Last but not least is the capability required for managing and handling customer interactions across any engagement channel, the capturing and applying analytics, and the artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) that should support the performance of the processes and agents.

The modernization of the contact center must also focus on human and machine agents interacting with customers across any channel.

The modernization of the contact center must also focus on human and machine agents interacting with customers across any channel. This focus is referred to as agent management, historically called workforce optimization, and now sometimes referred to as workforce engagement management (WEM) and support forecasting and scheduling. To provide successful customer engagement and interactions, organizations need to ensure that the applications for the operations and performance of agents are supported by AI and ML with analytics to understand and adapt to customer behavior. Digital self-service has become increasingly relevant as customers now prefer to seek information and take action at a time of their choosing via their preferred channel and device, most likely mobile, rather than engaging with a person over telephony. Unified communications should not only support contact from text, chat and video, but on whatever application and device that the customer desires. As is the case for other channels, organizations should be sure to invest in more robust intelligence applications that can be monitored and tracked through metrics.

Organizations are well aware of the imperatives to improve contact center processes and technologies in a way that enables their agents and engagement channels to provide the best possible personalized customer experience. Increasingly, the impetus to improve and integrate the contact center comes from leadership who realize the importance of customer satisfaction and its correlation to customer loyalty and retention. Many organizations are centralizing processes for customer experiences and engagement under new executives like the Chief Customer Officer, Chief Digital Officer or Chief Experience Officer. The reason for the shift is to improve the accountability and quality of operations with customers across digital channels and departments that provide interactions.

In our contact center suites research, we find that organizations that need technology have plenty of opportunities to digitally modernize their environment. In every significant category, the tools that are available are well equipped in functionality and more versatile in how they are managed and deployed. New vendors have entered the market, sometimes from surprising directions, and more established global vendors have been spurred to adapt.

But a diverse array of options means buyers need to do more complex homework to determine their needs and match solution providers to those needs.

But a diverse array of options means buyers need to do more complex homework to determine their needs and match solution providers to those needs. Buying contact center infrastructure is no longer a simple matter of selecting a voice routing engine and then letting that choice determine the rest of the application tech stack. That practice, though still common, does not always prepare an organization’s contact center for the complex challenges of managing customers across channels over time, nor for integrating operations into the business’s broader efforts to provide a unified customer experience.

Pared down to its essentials, the responsibility of a modern contact center is to meet customers in a communications environment of their choice, and provide whatever information or services matches the needs of both parties. In doing that, centers must balance the high costs of maintaining a labor force, an increasingly automated self-service entryway and an escalating use of data sourced from many internal systems. It is important to select vendor products based on criteria that go far beyond the traditional focus on telephony and efficiency.

While the industry has been “moving to the cloud” for more than a decade, not all contact centers that operate in an on-premises environment have made the shift. There are a lot of reasons why the transition has been so slow, with the primary holdup being the long life of legacy on-premises equipment and the inherent conservatism and risk-aversion that keeps centers from making dramatic, transformative changes whenever possible.

The fact that organizations move slowly represents an opportunity to leap over several interim technology generations and approach the question of customer service provisioning with a fresh perspective. The pandemic accelerated — and highlighted — several existing technology developments that were just beginning to come into focus, including work with AI, workflow automation, intelligent self-service and enhanced support for distributed workforces. Buyers are now also exploring hybrid deployments that mix cloud and on-premises applications based on an organization’s comfort level. We are moving away from the binary “cloud versus on premises” approach into a more realistic, situation-based model.

Another change that makes this market segment impactful, but more complicated, for buyers is the deemphasis of the voice channel, and with it, the core automatic call distribution (ACD).

Another change that makes this market segment impactful, though more complicated, for buyers is the deemphasis of the voice channel, and with it, the core automatic call distribution (ACD). The rise of digital channels is well known, and it appears that most interactions today are to some degree a mix of voice and digital, including chat, email, SMS and other similar channels. If you consider voice to be one of the many available digital channels, then it becomes possible to relegate the ACD to a secondary criterion when building a center’s overall infrastructure. While legacy ACD technology vendors, both cloud-based and on premises, still want buyers to focus on the communications aspect of the contact center, alternatives exist in the form of service-based software platforms that allow you to build your center around a data/analytics toolset or a ticketing and case management system, and bolt on the telephony provider of choice through open APIs.

It is common to evaluate vendor offerings for contact centers by zeroing in on a tightly defined niche, like the ACD or the self-service front end. We believe that, in an expanding environment, an organization needs to start with a broader approach that acknowledges the ongoing changes in contact center technology. To prepare for a rapidly changing future, organizations need to first understand the breadth of what vendors are offering, and then narrow their view to the platforms and applications that best map to their operations, goals and existing infrastructures.

The Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Contact Center Suites encompasses contact center and agent management applications and the underlying platforms and technology to support them. We examined the offerings of 22 vendors: some cloud-only, some on premises, some hybrid; some provide full offerings, others are platforms meant for building or plugging in third-party applications. Specific product evaluation criteria for capabilities included voice and digital interaction routing, interaction-handling analytics, workforce and quality management, agent performance management, agent desktop support, remote workforce support, automation and self-service, and data and integrations.      

As part of our contact center suites research, Ventana Research prepared two additional Buyers Guides that separate contact center platforms and agent management capabilities. Criteria for contact center capabilities included voice and digital interaction routing, workforce management, quality measurement, agent desktop, remote workforce and automation and self-service. Criteria for agent management capabilities included workforce management, primarily scheduling agents and forecasting volume; quality measurement, including interaction recording, agent evaluation, coaching, and performance measurement; agent experience and feedback; agent performance management and agent desktop. We also evaluated features related to agent guidance and assistance, gamification, collaboration and much more.

Some vendors overlap in the marketplace; others do not. This evaluation necessarily puts together some companies that do not directly compete, nor make systems in the same segment. A vendor that focuses on agent management but not routing will have different strengths and weaknesses than a vendor that provides the underlying voice or digital routing engine, or one that emphasizes AI-based self-service or complex interaction analytics. Buyers must go into the examination with the understanding that not all subsets of these vendors will be fit for purpose in every situation, and the variety of possible situations is enormous, varying by size, industry, geography and the nature of the organization’s customers. How a vendor is rated in this overall evaluation should be viewed in context with how it fares within the full scope of contact center suites and individually within the Buyers Guides specific to contact center platforms and agent management tools.

Our contact center suites research evaluates the following vendors that offer products that address key elements of contact center suites as we define them: 8x8, Alvaria, AWS, Avaya, Cisco, Content Guru, Dialpad, Emplifi, Enghouse Interactive, Five9, Genesys, LiveVox, Microsoft, NICE, RingCentral, Salesforce, Talkdesk, Twilio, Verint, Vonage and Zoom. Two additional vendors, Playvox and Calabrio, were evaluated in the Buyers Guide for Agent Management, available separately.

Buyers Guide Overview

For over two decades, Ventana Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. Ventana Research has designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of vendors and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirement in any organization. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select technology vendors and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to ranking and rating vendors in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an organization.

This Ventana Research Buyers Guide: Contact Center Suites is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings will address organizations requirements for contact center and agent management software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the RFP process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with technology vendors. An effective product and customer experience with a technology vendor can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment.

In this Buyers Guide, Ventana Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership and Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of capability, we applied the Ventana Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for contact center and agent management to an organization’s requirements.

Ventana Research believes that an objective review of vendors and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of software.

The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of vendors and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a vendor’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of a contact center and agent management technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an organization’s ability to reach its potential performance. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of vendors that does not represent a best fit for your organization.

To ensure the accuracy of the information we collected, we asked participating vendors to provide product and company information across the seven product and customer experience categories that, taken together, reflect the concerns of a well-crafted RFI. Ventana Research then validated the information, first independently through our database of product information and extensive web-based research, and then in consultation with the vendors. Most selected vendors also participated in a one-on-one session providing an overview and demonstration, after which we requested they provide additional documentation to support any new input.

Ventana Research believes that an objective review of vendors and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of contact center and agent management software and applications. An organization’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge organizations to do a thorough job of evaluating contact center suites and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these vendors and as an evaluation methodology.

How To Use This Buyers Guide

Evaluating Vendors: The Process

We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing technology vendors for your organization. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from technology vendors on their products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating a RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes.

1. Define the business case and goals.
   Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. 
2. Specify the business needs.
   Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology.
3. Assess the required roles and responsibilities.
   Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. 
4. Outline the project’s critical path.
   What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. 
5. Ascertain the technology approach.
   Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. 
6. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria.
   Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. 
7. Evaluate and select the technology properly.
   Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products.
8. Establish the business initiative team to start the project.
   Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources. 

The Findings

All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a technology vendor are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an organization if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your organization’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software.

Factors beyond features and functions or vendor assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an organization may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one vendor or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of vendors and products to your specific needs.

Overall Scoring of Vendors Across Categories

The research finds NICE first on the list with Genesys in second place and Verint in third. Companies that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Genesys has done so in all seven of the seven categories; NICE in six, Verint in three, Talkdesk in two, and Content Guru, Five9 and LiveVox in one.

The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the vendors. Those vendors whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. In short, vendors that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.

The research places vendors into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies vendors overall weighted performance.

Exemplary: The categorization and placement of vendors in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The vendors awarded Exemplary are: Avaya, Content Guru, Genesys, LiveVox, NICE, Salesforce, Talkdesk and Verint.

Innovative: The categorization and placement of vendors in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The vendors awarded Innovative are: Cisco, Five9 and RingCentral.

Assurance: The categorization and placement of vendors in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The vendors awarded Assurance are: Alvaria, Emplifi and Mitel.

Merit: The categorization for vendors in Merit (lower left) represent those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The vendors awarded Merit are: 8x8, AWS, Dialpad, Enghouse Interactive, Microsoft, Twilio, Vonage and Zoom.

We warn that close vendor placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every organization or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle contact center and agent management, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one vendor’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular organization’s needs.

We advise organizations to assess and evaluate vendors based on their requirements and use this research as a reference to their own evaluation of a vendor and products.

Product Experience

The process of researching products to address an organization’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with an organization’s life cycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, vendors are not evaluated for the entirety of the products; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent an organization’s requirements but how the vendor operates. As more vendors orient to a complete product experience, a more robust evaluation can be conducted.

The research based on the methodology of expertise identified the weighting of Product Experience to 80% or four-fifths of the total evaluation. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Usability (20%), Capability (20%), Reliability (15%), Adaptability (10%) and Manageability (15%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall rankings in this research. NICE, Genesys and Verint were designated Product Experience Leaders as a result of their commitment to contact center suite technology. Vendor rankings for Content Guru, Five9 and LiveVox were found to meet a broader range of enterprise contact center and agent management requirements.

Many organizations will only evaluate capabilities for those in IT or administration, but the research identified the criticality of Usability (20% weighting) across a broader set of usage personas that should participate in contact center and agent management.

Customer Experience

The importance of a customer relationship with a vendor is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire life cycle an organization has with its vendor is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that vendor. It is essential that buyers have confidence in their vendors in order to get the most out of their expensive technology purchases. The customer experience that buyers have stretches through the sales process, deployment and ongoing upgrades, enhancements and changes in the tools. Technology providers that have Chief Customer Officers are more likely to make greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring that the marketplace understands the nature of their commitment through clarity of the website and during the buying process and customer journey.

Our Value Index methodology weights Customer Experience at 20%, or one-fifth, as it represents the framework of commitment and value to the vendor-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are Validation (10%) and TCO/ROI (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research.

The vendors that ranked the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are Genesys, NICE and Verint. These category leaders in Customer Experience provided the highest level of information to communicate their commitment and dedication to customer needs. Vendors such as LiveVox, Emplifi and Content Guru were not Overall Leaders, but also have a high level of commitment to Customer Experience.

There were many vendors that have not made Customer Experience a priority and provided little to no information through their website and presentations for our evaluation. Many have customer case studies to promote their success, but lacked depth on what they do to provide their commitment to an organizations’ journey with contact center and agent management. This makes it increasingly difficult for organizations to evaluate vendors on the merits of their commitment to customer success. As a result, many of the vendors did not rank as well in Customer Experience as they did on Product Experience, though it does not mean their products will not provide adequate support for contact center and agent management operations. As the commitment to a vendor is a continuous investment, the importance of supporting customer experience in a holistic evaluation should be included and not underestimated.

Appendix: Vendor Inclusion

For inclusion in the Ventana Research Contact Center Suites Buyers Guide for 2023, a vendor must be in good standing financially and ethically, at least $50 million in USD or equivalent for contact center platform vendors; or at least $20 million for vendors of exclusively agent management systems. The firm must operate across at least two countries and have at least 50 customers.

This research is one of three Buyers Guide covering the overall market and two underlying market segments. Vendors in the overall contact center suites that includes agent management segments were evaluated based on the capabilities that include:

• Interaction routing (voice and digital)
• Interaction handling analytics
• Workforce and quality management
• Agent performance management
• Agent desktop support
• Remote workforce support
• Automation and self-service
• Data and integrations

The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of vendor packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include vendors that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a vendor is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and is reflected on its website that it is within the scope of the research, that vendor is automatically evaluated for inclusion. 

All vendors that offer relevant contact center and agent management products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the research evaluation process at no cost to them.

Six of the 22 vendors responded positively to our requests for additional information and provided completed questionnaires and demonstrations to help in our evaluation of their contact center and agent management products. We categorize participation as follows:

Complete participation: The following vendors actively participated and provided completed questionnaires and demonstrations to help in our evaluation of their product: Content Guru, Emplifi, Genesys, LiveVox, NICE and Verint.

Partial participation: The following vendors provided limited information to help in our evaluation: AWS, Avaya, Dialpad, Five9, Salesforce, Talkdesk and Vonage.

No participation: The following vendors provided no information or did not respond to our request: 8x8, Alvaria, Cisco, Enghouse Interactive, Microsoft, Mitel, RingCentral, Twilio, and Zoom.

Vendors that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have significant impact on their classification and rating, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those vendors.

Products Evaluated

Vendors of Note

We did not include vendors that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in the Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Vendors of Note.”