The North American contact center applications markets are poised for “significant growth” in the next few years, and growth rates are “expected to peak between 2008 and 2010,” notes Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) Research Analyst Kunal Kakodkar in a recent report.

 

“Growth in contact center applications will primarily be driven by two factors: an increasing trend amongst customers to move to IP-based technology and the replacement sales of systems sold around Y2K,” the report notes.

 

As expected, the tier one contact center products vendors lead the aggregated market share. Frost & Sullivan found that Avaya’s (News - Alert) “dominant presence” in the ICR market carries forward to the overall numbers and combined with the company’s play in outbound dialing and IVR markets, its revenues exceed the total of its next four closest competitors.

 

At the same time, “significant merger activity has resulted in relatively niche participants grabbing significant shares of the market,” the report says. NICE Systems’ mid-2006 acquisition of IEX (News - Alert) gave it a healthy 4.2 percent overall share — all of it in the agent performance optimization space.

 

Oracle’s (News - Alert) acquisitions of Siebel Systems and PeopleSoft strengthened its play in the North American customer relationship management market, giving it a lion’s share of the MM systems.

 

However, as the large enterprise segment begins to saturate, there may be a marked stagnation in growth, the report cautions: “Taking this into consideration, vendors should adapt their marketing strategy to target the small- to mid-sized business.”

 

There will be “tremendous potential for growth in the small- to mid-enterprise sector,” says Kakodkar. “The industry may experience a slowdown till the still-nascent SMB strategies of the large enterprise vendors come to fruition.”

 

Last year a study presented by NewVoiceMedia, a European hosted telephony service provider, found that contact centers are failing to use CRM data for business initiatives.

 

The findings were presented at an event showcasing Individual Caller Treatment, a concept being pushed by NewVoiceMedia, and basically elaborations of the principle that the “missing link” between contact centers and CRM is costing millions in lost revenues.

 

David Beard, Partner Development at Sage CRM and a participant at the showcase event, noted that while companies collected customer data and invested heavily on marketing campaigns to entice customers to make contact, “many businesses fail to use the data they already have to use the contact center to provide individualized customer care.”

 

Customers, Beard believes, are at their most receptive when they call into a business, and urged businesses and contact centers provide the same level of highly personalized and interactive customer service that consumers get online over the telephone.

 

“Getting callers to hold for long periods of time or asking them to go through endless menus is not the best way to make a customer feel valued” agreed NewVoiceMedia’s CEO Jonathan Grant. He advocated combining CRM with telephony to offer businesses “an intelligent marketing tool that can cross and up sell services to clients,” increase revenues and boost caller satisfaction.

 

ICT, Grant explained, allows customers to be fast-tracked to their dedicated agent, based on their previous call or based on the information a business might already have about the caller. The customer can also be played relevant, targeted messages (translation: phone ads) while they’re on hold.

 

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