Companies have a number of different options when it comes to choosing a contact center platform. Metrigy’s global Customer Experience MetriCast 2023 market size and forecast study, conducted with 1,695 companies, finds that 32% of companies using a contact center platform utilize Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS). While the majority of contact center agents work off on-premises platforms, the adoption trend is toward CCaaS in that it allows improved flexibility and scalability, the ability to move to an OpEx model, quicker access to enhanced capabilities, deep analytics, and customer insights across digital channels.
The CCaaS market is highly competitive, with providers of varying sizes, capabilities, and reach—some are global, and others are regional. Some providers are large and have broad portfolios and others are smaller, with niche offerings. The options can be overwhelming for companies to choose from as they make the transition.
Metrigy examines the leading CCaaS providers in its CCaaS MetriRank report which should be on companies' shortlist for evaluation. The criteria that went into the evaluation include:
NICE is the undisputed leader with the largest market share, strong financials, and full marks for product mix. NICE’s CCaaS offering is based on its cloud platform, CXone, in combination with its Enlighten AI platform. NICE has a commanding lead on the field, putting it in a good position to continue top performance over the next few years.
Right behind NICE comes Five9. As a pure-play CCaaS provider, Five9 is highly focused on delivering the right mix of capabilities. The company has stayed true to its roots, focusing exclusively on its CCaaS offering, the Five9 Intelligent CX Platform. While third in market share, Five9 gets an important jump because of its customer sentiment score.
Closely behind Five9 is Cisco, which had the highest possible financial strength score and a strong customer sentiment score. Genesys and 8x8 rounded out the top five CCaaS providers. Genesys ended 2022 with the second-largest market share and high marks for product mix. 8x8 stands apart with the highest possible scores for customer sentiment and customer business success which is a testament to a product focus and support.
Three of the top five providers—NICE, Cisco, and Genesys—are traditional platform vendors, which gives them a critical advantage of an installed base of contact center customers to whom they can upsell to CCaaS. These three vendors all fall in the top four of our ranking, illustrating the importance of existing contact center customers and long history in delivering contact center solutions that gives these companies expertise that is not easily replicated.
Two of the top providers—Five9 and Talkdesk—are pure-play CCaaS providers that developed cloud-based contact center solutions as their heritage. They were ahead of the game in developing born-in-the-cloud solutions without the burden of trying to retrofit on-premises platforms from the cloud. Both providers know what it takes to build and run CCaaS solutions.
Most UCaaS providers have branched into CCaaS in some form or another over the past five years, and in some cases the contact center solutions have grown more important that the UC portion of their integrated platforms. In fact, 66.9% of the 641 companies in Metrigy’s Customer Experience Optimization: 2023-24 global study said the contact center carries more weight in vendor selection when buying a combined UC/contact center platform. 8x8, Vonage, and Dialpad have added CCaaS to their portfolios. (Cisco also offers UCaaS and CCaaS, but it started in the contact center world as an on-premises platform provider.) In Metrigy’s Customer Experience MetriCast 2023 study, 50% of respondents indicated they are using the same vendor for UC and contact center—clearly a competitive advantage for those offering a single integrated platform. Other IT and CX leaders prefer a best-of-breed approach, selecting the best provider for each platform and then handling the integration on their own.
The remaining three CCaaS providers—Sprinklr, AWS, and Twilio—come from various cloud backgrounds. Sprinklr evolved its expertise in social monitoring and customer insights into a larger portfolio of CX solutions, including CCaaS. AWS, which has the biggest market share of the three, has the strongest ties to cloud infrastructure and cloud computing services. Lastly, Twilio started as a leader in Communication Platform- as a Service (CPaaS) and APIs, which it parlayed into a few stand-alone products, including CCaaS.
CCaaS providers that did not make the 2023 ranking but that are on Metrigy’s watchlist and merit ongoing attention are Avaya, Content Guru, Microsoft, Salesforce, UJET, Zendesk, and Zoom. 2023 is shaping up to be an important year of enhanced product development, particularly around artificial intelligence (AI), which will become a significant factor moving forward. Utilizing AI in the contact center continues to evolve and can take multiple forms including agent assist, chatbots, sentiment analysis, and AI-driven routing. Companies looking to harness the power of AI within the contact center environment. The leading CCaaS providers are investing in AI with their own tools and augmenting with market leading AI solutions to deliver market leading solutions in real-time.
