Top Analysts Covering Contact Center Technology in 2014

If you want to keep up with the contact center industry, a vital resource is the analyst community. A year ago, we published our list of the top analysts who cover this space. Time for an update!

We have added four new people to the list: Dave Michels, Blair Pleasant, Tim Smith, and Paul Stockford.

We have removed two people, not because we don’t like them (quite the opposite!), but because they have left the analyst game. Ian Jacobs is now at Genesys, and Daniel Hong is now 24/7.ai.

Here is the updated list, in alphabetical order.

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Recommended Reading:

• Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You: Does Proactive Customer Engagement Make Sense for Your Business? (quick preview to free pdf download)

 

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Recommended Reading:

• Use of Social CRM for Customer Service Will Grow Rapidly Over the Next Two Years
• Forecast: Contact Centers, Worldwide, 2010-2017 (subscribers only)

 

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Today we communicate with our merchants via a variety of means – Facebook, Twitter, chat, maybe even video, in addition to voice… Harmonization between these isolated customer engagement … as new platforms continue to emerge ….including Moxie, Oracle’s Right Now, and Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud compet[ing] with the more traditional CRM vendors including Aspect, Avaya, Cisco, and Genesys.

Recommended Reading:

• Rethinking the Contact Center
• 2013-14 Enterprise Technology Benchmark- Unified Communications, Contact Center and Social Business (Subscribers only)

 

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Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

Focus: Customer Service – Market Trends, Research, Opinions, Best Practices, and Technologies
Web: forrester.com/kate_leggett
Twitter: @kateleggett

Good customer service is the result of the right attention to strategy, business processes, technology, and people management… The contact center technology ecosystem for customer service is a nightmare of complexity.

Recommended Reading:

• Why is Customer Service So Hard to Get Right?
• An Explosion of Channels for Customer Service with Inconsistent Satisfaction Ratings 

 

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VP Research, Gartner

Focus: CRM, Multichannel Contact Center Applications, and Social CRM/Communities
Web: blogs.gartner.com/michael_maoz/
Twitter: @Gartner_inc

Call Centers ruled the ’70s through 1990s, and Contact Centers have ruled ever since. Dinosaurs too ruled for a long time, and in the same way, Contact Centers are having their own asteroid collision theory now.

Recommended Reading:

• The Beginnings of the CRM Customer Engagement Center
• Social Media as the Newest Job Eliminator

 

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Focus: Contact Center and Enterprise Communications Markets
Web: www.mcgeesmith.com
Twitter: @mcgeesmith

While Avaya telephony, unified communications and contact center applications all use Avaya Aura as a core platform, it has not always been easy to for either Avaya or third parties to build applications that cut across the silos of individual solutions. Avaya Collaboration Environment… promises to do just that.

Recommended Reading:

• Avaya/Nortel Contact Center Integration Evolution
• inContact Delivers a Personal Connection

 

Focus:  Cloud Services, SMB Voice, Channel Development, Unified Communications, and Social Media
Web: http://www.talkingpointz.com/pindropsoup
Twitter: @davemichels

Terms such as unified communications, PBX, HD, channel, are frequently used, yet there’s little agreement on exact meaning. Of course, that doesn’t make the terms any less popular – slight literary confusion and disorientation are the marks of a telecom professional.

Recommended Reading:

• 5 Threats That Could Derail WebRTC
• Which One is the Customer Again?

 

Senior Analyst & Founder, Opus Research

Focus: Mobile Customer Care, Conversational Commerce, and Voice Biometrics
Web: OpusResearch.net
Twitter: @dnm54

Customers equate ‘service quality’ with quick resolution of their problems by a live agent. If they are put on hold, confronted with confusing options or delivered to an individual who is not up-to-speed with their requirements, they think less of your company and its brand.

Recommended Reading:

• The Conversational Cloud: Beyond the Hosted Contact Center
• Conversational Commerce – IVRs Take on New Tasks

 

Principal Analyst, Confusion

Focus: Unified Communications, Collaboration, Social Software, Unified Messaging, Contact Centers, CTI, IP Telephony, and Voice/Data
Web: http://www.commfusion.com
Twitter: @blairplez

 Genesys is in a period of transition, with new acquisitions and new service offerings. It has a lot of work to do to make everything come together and work seamlessly…. Fortunately it can gain momentum based on the Angel and Soundbite customer base and the expertise it acquired. The game is afoot.

 

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Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

Focus: Unified Communications and Contact Center Technology
Web: Forrester.com

 

[UC deployments] fail because users can ignore you and you lose the benefits … You have to establish and [invest] in a change-management program.

Recommended Reading:

• Mind The Gap When Organizing To Support Contact Center Applications (subscribers only)
• Is It Time To Move Your Contact Center To The Cloud? (subscribers only)

 

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Senior Research Analyst

Focus: Unified Communications, Contact Center, and Social Business
Web: https://www.nemertes.com/analysts/tim-smith

 

Another useful tool in contact management is the idea of the call-back. Rather than putting people on hold, let them schedule a call back at a pre-determined time. Good for the caller, good for the management of the contact center. A company called Fonolo offers a SaaS/cloud approach to call backs along with limited cross-channel capabilities.

Recommended Reading:

• Contact Center Bolt-Ons Revisited
• 2013-14 Enterprise Technology Benchmark: Multichannel, Cloud Top Contact-Center Trends (Subscribers only)

 

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Owner, Saddletree Research

Focus: Contact center, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Social Media
Twitter: @paulstockford

The next generation of contact center industry leaders is ready to move up…  Cisco is ready to come out of the data closet.  Verint is finding its way into the enterprise at large through …acquisitions and innovations.  Aspect is firmly anchored in its rediscovered identity as a contact center solution provider.  And let’s not overlook a growing group of cloud providers …  Avaya isn’t out of the game yet, but it is going to have to undergo some significant changes if it is to remain competitive in a rapidly changing industry.