Research firm MarketsandMarkets has valued the current market for contact center software at $35.2 billion and projects it to reach $93.7 billion by 2027, growing at a compound annual rate of 21.6 percent.
The firm last year predicted that the global contact center software market would reach $75.5 billion in 2026, expanding at a compound annual rate of 20.9 percent, so this is a significant increase in its projections.
The firm notes that the COVID pandemic has had a huge impact on the contact center software market, particularly as contact centers offering travel and healthcare information significantly increased. Contact centers also deployed automation, such as chatbots, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing to help callers with first contact resolution.
It also found that a growing number of social media capabilities in the contact center are driving growth. Today's contact center solution providers enable organizations to handle queries that come from social media to assess brand value and brand impact, and to reduce costs and complexities.
At the same time, though, the market continues to struggle with infrastructure and security issues, according to the report.
Many contact centers still depend on primary rate interface (PRI) phone services, which provide 23 voice channels that can be used simultaneously. However, if a company wants to access large number of direct inward dialing (DID) numbers, companies need to install more PRI circuits, which leads to more overhead costs, according to MarketsandMarkets.
Contact centers are always at risk due to the large amount of customer data involved, the firm said, and longer calls increase operating costs.
And while cloud deployment models have long been expected to dominate the contact center market, MarketsandMarkets' research projects that on-premises deployment will share large revenues, noting that on-premises deployment is preferable for organizations that are data-sensitive, have a large number of agents, and require greater system security.
Larger enterprises will also be a larger contributor to the contact center software market, according to the firm, which noted that large organizations usually require more complicated integrations but also have sufficient budgets, a large number of contact center agents, and high call volume.
The contact center software market is undergoing significant technological transitions, such as cloud, big data, artificial intelligence-enabled bots, real-time chat, and product recommendation engines. All these advancements are favorably welcomed and highly adopted by large organizations, MarketsandMarkets said in the report.
The research also found that the financial services and insurance sectors account for largest market share, relying heavily on contact center analytics to improve operational performance and address customer requirements.
Key market players identified in the report include IBM, Genesys, Amazon Web Services, Five9, Twilio, Mitel, Cisco, BT, Verizon, Avaya, Vonage, 8x8, Atos, Talkdesk, NICE, and Alcatel Lucent.