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Global IVR Systems Market Estimated to Reach $2.78 Billion by 2017: GIA
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Global IVR Systems Market Estimated to Reach $2.78 Billion by 2017: GIA

 
November 14, 2011

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  By Rajani Baburajan, TMCnet Contributor
 


A recent report from Global Industry Analysts (GIA) predicts that the global Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Systems market will reach $2.78 billion by 2017.

This growth, according to GIA, will be primarily driven by growing prominence of outbound IVR, increasing opportunities in the SMB segment, innovative pricing strategies, technological advancements and development of open standards. IVR growth in developing markets, especially Asia-Pacific, will also push this growth.


The research report, titled "Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Systems: A Global Strategic Business Report" by Global Industry Analysts, provides a comprehensive review of market trends, issues, drivers, company profiles, mergers, acquisitions and other strategic industry activities.

According to the report, the U.S. continues to represent the largest and one of the fastest growing regional markets for IVR systems, waxing at a CAGR of about 10.32 percent over the analysis period. This growth is especially driven by robust demand from domestic financial services industry, which is undergoing significant restructuring post recession, and the presence of several leading players with advanced proprietary technologies.

“Although large enterprise segment (65+ IVR ports) has been the traditional revenue contributor for the IVR systems market, future growth will largely stem from small and medium business opportunities. 25 to 46 Ports market represents the fastest growing product segment,” the report said.

According to the study, business process strategies like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) have gained utmost importance over the past few years thanks to the competition and ever-changing customer demands. Companies are focusing on improving various aspects associated with CRM in order to provide better customer services. As a result, IVR, an integral part of the customer service strategies, comes to the forefront.

“Given that most of the legacy IVR systems are expensive to maintain, highly rigid and largely capable of addressing the fast changing customer service requirements of large enterprises, several companies are deploying new, open-standard IVR technologies such as VoiceXML (News - Alert),” according to GIA.

The emergence of these technologies has enabled companies to customize phone-based customer services to suite their requirements and are therefore fast growing in prominence.

The IVR market was down during 2009 owing to recession-induced cutbacks on technology spending and investments, but the market regained in 2011 primarily driven by the refocus of the companies on customer retention, new customer acquisition, and customer satisfaction ratings.

Contact centers, the customer facing business, have a compelling need to strategically invest in technologies and tools that help differentiate themselves, ever more so in challenging times like the economic recession. They also focused on benchmarking customer experience and emphasized on IVR optimization, which helped in bringing fresh opportunities for product replacements and upgrades.

GIA says that contact centers cannot afford to scale back investments on customer service, as it could result in loss of customers as fickle loyalty during challenging economic times leads to migration to competitors who favor their patronage. 

The disproportionately higher costs associated with loss of clients and loss in productivity/performance, and significant costs associated with new client acquisition, additionally discourages prolonged investment cutbacks. Therefore, scaling back customer service budgets is a perilous, high-risk high-wire act for companies, the research said.

According to the research, the IVR market will be driven by growing prominence of outbound IVR as a cost effective solution. Outbound IVR is changing the traditional image of organization-customer interaction and will continue to evolve as IVR capabilities are extended to handle newer channels, such as SMS and video.

Other key driver of the IVR market is the demand from the financial services industry, which is forecast to increase especially after the recession triggered consolidation leaves a need for standards-based interactive voice response and customer interaction solutions in the newly merged, acquired and established companies.

In addition to these, the growth of QM/Recording solutions that play an important role in helping boost productivity will contribute for the growth of IVR market. QM/Recording solutions are now made available on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) or a hosted basis instead of conventional, premise-based licensed product delivery model.

Major players in the marketplace include Aspect Software, AT&T, Avaya, BCE (News - Alert), Cisco Systems, Convergys Corp, Dialogic Corporation, Enghouse Systems Limited, Syntellect, Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Healthcare Technology Systems, IBM, Mitel Networks Corporation, Nuance Communications, Philips Speech Processing, Verizon Communications, Voxeo (News - Alert) Corporation, West Corporation, Holly Connects, among others.


Rajani Baburajan is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Rajani's articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Tammy Wolf
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