The report “Decision Matrix - Selecting an IP Contact Centre Vendor”, which provides a comparative analysis of the top IP contact centre vendors in the enterprise market, says that IP contact centre vendors have begun to offer unified product lines, aiming for common administration and reporting, common user interfaces and functionality far beyond basic routing.
An IP contact centre is any contact centre that does not use traditional circuit switching; that is, all calls are voice-over-IP or are converted from TDM to IP. An IP contact centre leverages the intrinsic benefits of IP communications, including the fact that either or both voice and data communications can be efficiently routed to any customer service agent with access to an IP connection. Through the use of SIP, IP contact centres can detect and route customer communications based on SIP-controlled presence management in place of the traditional automatic call director (ACD).
“In order to offset markedly slower growth in the their traditional stronghold of the large enterprise market, IPCC vendors that had traditionally sold technology for very large contact centres will continue to try to find ways to package and sell products for smaller customers,” says Ian Jacobs, senior analyst for customer interaction technologies at Datamonitor and the report's author. “This means increased competition for companies that have already created small and mid-sized enterprise products. It also means increased competition for technologically and business process-savvy channel partners from which smaller companies typically buy such products.”
Taking these trends into account, Datamonitor created a three-pronged framework for evaluating IPCC vendors. In the Decision Matrix, Datamonitor provides a summary of IP contact centre vendors' capabilities based on a quantitative assessment of their market impact and end-user sentiment, as well as an extensive review of the technology features that they offer. Taken together, these three set of criteria serve as the basis for Datamonitor's positioning of vendors as Shortlist, Consider, or Explore in the competitive landscape.
The ‘shortlist' category features two very different vendors: Avaya, with a long communications equipment history, and Alcaltel-Lucent / Genesys, a parent company that merges two different enterprise and carrier communications vendors and a subsidiary that has been successful by upending the switch-dependent paradigm for contact centres.
“There is little space between these market leaders, an indicator of the intensely competitive nature of the contact centre industry and of the wide-ranging, but differing, appeal of the two companies' approaches,” says Jacobs. “Although both were selected as leaders, Alcatel-Lucent / Genesys and Avaya have very different priorities and roadmaps and will not necessarily always directly compete for the same client accounts.”
The sluggish economy has led to a change in strategy in the contact centre: the focus has shifted from customer acquisition to customer retention. Clients' budgets are tightening and consumer confidence is in decline along with consumer spending. This is making it difficult for enterprises to gain new business, and they are concentrating on current customers, improving customer service and seeking out contract renewals and upgrade opportunities. Customer service quality and customer intimacy are becoming increasingly important to achieve good customer loyalty rates.
Core IP contact centre features and functions are important and customers still consider functionality when making their purchasing decisions. “But, the difference between choosing vendor A and vendor B rarely comes down to which technology provider can implement specific-agent recall routing rules or which one has a scripting engine for canned email responses,” concludes Jacobs. “This is why it is crucial for enterprises to consider technology alongside other factors such as a vendor's reputation among its own customers and its position in the market.”
