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Contact Center Vendors: Perk Up -- It's Not the End of the World

The contact center market has apparently reached a state of equilibrium from where it can no longer grow.  It’s natural for vendors to feel shaky, but a matured market is only a sign of “redirected opportunities,” and a new report seeks to allay vendor fears of “closed doors” by observing that -- while certain avenues will be closed – “other doors will open.”

In the report from Research and Markets titled "Opportunities in a Mature Contact Center Market," the research firm notes that contact center seats will shrink from 4.1 million in 2012 to four million by 2017, because demand for both inbound and outbound contact centers is expected to gradually decline in North America. But even so, it doesn’t hear alarm bells ringing.

Any mature market, it noted, will bring along with it some degree of instability, but also a different set of opportunities. In this case, if seats at contact centers decrease, the opportunities that hosted solutions bring could well address vendor concerns.

A decade ago, contact centers viewed the cloud with a great deal of trepidation, but over time cost, flexibility and the need to remain afloat has triggered them to adopt cloud-based solutions. It’s only a matter of time before an increasing number are likely to migrate “at least some or most” of their applications to the cloud, giving vendors the opportunity that they are seeking.

Hosted delivery not only provides companies with business continuity, but allows them to cut costs by allowing them to buy only the applications and capacity they need -- a rather attractive value proposition for SMBs and for large companies looking for customized offerings.

Of course, this does mean that everyone will be trying to get a share of the hosted space, which could become crowded very soon. But, this market will very quickly decide “who stays and who goes.” The ones that stay in business will be the innovators and those willing to readjust their strategies so that they align with the new wavelengths that emerge.

So although hosted vendors will have opportunities to thrive, they have to prove that they are different from the “the new guys that are likely to invade their territory” by creating differentiation, better user interfaces, and learning to “think out of the box.”

It’s not going to be a totally whole new ball game by any means, but that doesn’t mean that vendors won’t have to work hard to get the numbers that will keep them ticking.


Edited by Rory J. Thompson