Research firm Mordor Intelligence valued the global contact center transformation market at $23.83 billion in 2019 and expects it to reach $88.52 billion by 2027, growing at a compounded annual rate of 17.9 percent.
The report notes that contact centers have slowly been moving to the cloud, but adds that there has been major reluctance to faster adoption due to the requirement to maintain control, heavy financial investments in on-premises, and complex transitioning to cloud.
At the same time, it points out that the COVID-19 crisis and the need for remote working have resulted in a sudden shift from traditional on-premises contact centers to cloud-based contact centers.
Another reason for the transformation, cited in the report, is that legacy contact centers operate on older technologies that cannot support newer channels, such as social media, mobile app chats, or videos. The cloud-based contact centers can aid companies in achieving these goals, and modern channels can be integrated by using communication application programming interfaces (APIs), it said.
Among the types of technologies being moved to the cloud, Mordor observed strong activity around intelligent call routing, which uses artificial intelligence to connect customers with the best agents for meeting their needs. It notes that this is much more efficient than typical interactive voice response-based routing.
The research also found that multiple organization leaders project an increased talent requirement for call centers, with automation to be an important element. Organizations that are struggling to use artificial intelligence to automate customer service cited an inability to deal with natural languages..
Still, it found that, as many as 99 percent of companies are randomly routing customer calls or using methodology other than intelligent routing to connect calls to agents.
A similar technology, called predictive behavioral routing (PBR), is also gaining in importance, according to the report. PBR, it said, uses a language-based behavioral model with data for hundreds of millions of customers through millions of language-based personality algorithms and is known to transform the call router from a tactical call delivery tool into a strategic solution.