It’s earnings time. We’ve been following publically-traded companies for whom cloud call center is a significant component of their business. Many released financial results in the past couple weeks, so let’s see what can be discerned about the near term future of the sector. This isn’t an exhaustive review, of course. To keep the blog post digestible, we are just focussing on companies with interesting news. This quarter that’s Avaya, Five9, RingCentral and Twilio.
Tag Archives: twilio
![3 Takeaways from Our Live Discussion on How the Twilio / Amazon ‘Stack’ is Changing the Call Center [Video]](https://fonolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/3-Takeaways-from-Our-Live-Discussion-on-How-the-Twilio-Amazon-‘Stack’-is-Changing-the-Call-Center-Video.png "3 Takeaways from Our Live Discussion on How the Twilio / Amazon ‘Stack’ is Changing the Call Center [Video]")
Last week, Fonolo hosted an insightful live discussion on how the new Twilio / Amazon “stack” will impact call center technology decisions moving forward. This expert panel discussed the unexpected power couple, the impact on call center innovation, and so much more! To save you some time, we’ve extracted video snippets showcasing highlights from the discussion.
First, let’s take a quick look at the panel of speakers: Alan Quayle, Dave Michels, Nicolas de Kouchkovsky, Shai Berger. Continue reading
Twilio unveiled Flex, its new call center product yesterday and it definitely lived up to the anticipation that has been building since the rumors started last month. Our two stories on it Twilio Shakes Up the Cloud Call Center World with Flex and The Twilio / Amazon ‘Stack’ Will Dominate the Next Call Center Era broke our traffic records, so we knew the interest level was red hot.
The big question we talked about in those posts was whether Flex would be a “formal” cloud call center offering, with per-agent / per-month pricing or some kind of upgrade to its existing call center related APIs. Turns out it’s neither. It’s something new: a call center platform. Fascinating.
The number of cloud-based call centers is growing quickly and they are increasingly built on top of Amazon and/or Twilio. That includes both newcomers like TalkDesk and Serenova, as well as legacy vendors like Avaya and Genesys. However, Twilio and Amazon now have their own call center platforms (essentially competing with their own customers). Will the Amazon / Twilio “stack” define the contours of the next generation of call center?
Something new this week! As a result of recent acquisitions and other maneuvers, we now have a nice sample size of publicly listed companies for whom cloud call center is a key focus. Many of them released their Q4 earnings in the past couple weeks. It’s interesting to review the numbers at a high level to see what kind of picture they paint for the near term future of the sector. Short answer: Pretty positive.
Let’s take a quick look at what was reported by Avaya, Five9, NICE, RingCentral, Twilio and 8×8.
Rumors broke on Friday that Twilio will be launching its own call center product called “Flex” next month. If true, this would be a major shake-up of the cloud call center world. There are already many cloud call centers available, but this one is different.
First, Twilio has strong financial resources to develop and market this new product. Second, Twilio has an advantage over most other competitors in that it runs a massively scaled, global telephony network. Third, and most importantly, Twilio has – until now – been solely providing call center building blocks that other call centers were built on. Now, Twilio will be competing with its customers, at least to some extent.
How big of an impact will this be? It really boils down to one question…
Last week I wrote about the cloud-based call center gang. This week, let’s look at the “legacy” gang. Yes, the term “legacy” is used in a negative way these days, but I don’t mean it that way. I just want to group together companies that have been selling call centers for many years, compared to the relative new-comers. (If there’s a nicer term, someone please let me know in the comments.)
As you would expect, the large call center vendors are jockeying for position fiercely. Avaya’s recent bankruptcy created an opportunity for competitors to pounce. Meanwhile, they are all worried about the threat “from below”, i.e. newer cloud-based competitors that started by focussing on small business, but are moving steadily up-market.
The cloud has radically transformed the call center industry. This shift, now chugging along into its second decade, has been well covered and is no longer surprising.
Imagine if someone from this industry time-traveled to 2018 from, say, 5 years ago. (Admittedly, not a great pitch for a sci-fi movie.) To him, the growing number of agent seats served from the cloud would be quite expected. But what would be unexpected is the new power centers created by that shift. Two companies, neither of which would be top-of-mind for our time traveler, have grabbed strategic territory in the new ecosystem, and they seem poised to dominate even further. Continue reading
One of our goals with the Fonolo blog is to help you stay current on the many aspects of the fast-moving contact center industry. To that end, we’re always on the look-out for new industry research, studies, surveys and whitepapers.
The vast number of companies doing “content marketing” means there is a lot of material out there. Sadly, that’s made it hard to find quality among all the fluff, so we’ve assembled 4 recent reports that we feel are worth your time. We’d like to express how grateful we are to the authors (and sponsors that back them) for the hard work that goes in to producing this content. They feature original research and cover topics such as consumer channel preference, the growth of chat, the ROI of social media for customer support, and much more.
We’re now 6 months into the largest bankruptcy event in the history of the call center industry.
Avaya filed for Chapter 11 protection in January. The negotiations among the many stakeholders have happened behind closed doors so it’s hard to assess where we are along the timeline.
Only one significant event has been visible to the public so far: In March, Avaya agreed to sell its networking business to Extreme Networks for $100 million. That move was received positively by analysts and commentators.
But the big question remains: Are we a month away from a resolution? A year? No one knows. As the bankruptcy continues, the patience of partners, analysts and customers wears down. Each day is also another opportunity for competitors to pick away at Avaya’s customers.
