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Contact Center Buyers Guide,North America, 2019Providers Look to Harness AI to Infuse Intelligencein the Customer ExperienceExecutive Summary & Bright Pattern ProfileGlobal Digital Transformation Research Team at Frost & SullivanK344-76August 2019
Contact Center Buyers Guide, North America, 2019Executive Summary: the Competitive Landscapeat a GlanceThis buyer’s guide examines the North American contact center market. In the pastFrost & Sullivan has done separate buyers guides for the contact center on-premisesystems and hosted/cloud markets. However, this year the guides are combined.Key TrendsIn the 2018 Cloud Contact Center Buyers Guide, Frost & Sullivan noted 3 primarytrends driving the customer care industry: the adoption of cloud as standard; econtextofdigitaltransformation; and a focus by providers on developing solutions that address theneeds of a changing workforce. These trends continue unabated in 2019, with furtherrefinement. Of particular note are the following: Hybrid Cloud. Cloud is still a given, but hybrid is a hot topic as outlined below.Companies are using the cloud not just to host contact center services but also toget a head start on innovation when rip and elevate isn’t yet an option. As such,providers have adapted by:oContinuing to bolster on-premise offerings so customers can get additionalvalue out of their existing operations.oCreating and stocking app stores for third-party cloud applications to deliverinnovation for cloud customers and to supplement on-premise systems.o Ensuring tight integration between cloud and on-premise applications.WEM. Workforce engagement management made its debut as one of the keytrends driving the industry in 2018 and 2019. Listen, Free, Motivate, Empower,Protect, and Enable are all descriptors of design considerations for workforceengagement. AI. The industry has finally reached the edge of the hype cycle for the umbrellaterm artificial intelligence (AI) and is actively harnessing a set of AI technologies toinfuse intelligence across the customer contact landscape. Just as important, keyproviders in this guide are learning how to properly market and position their AIwares in addition to building professional services and consulting resources toassist customers with strategic AI plans.K288-762
Contact Center Buyers Guide, North America, 2019Frost & Sullivan found that these trends are continuing to drive deep change in theindustry; for buyers, that means the competitive landscape remains as complex anddifficult to navigate as ever.IntroductionIn 2017, hosted and cloud contact center revenue in North America continued on itshealthy growth path in all application segments. Total market revenue grew 12.7%. Inparticular, automatic call distribution sported 23.3% year-over-year growth and agentperformance optimization increased 39.2%. Frost & Sullivan forecasts the overallmarket revenue to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 11.4% through2022. In addition to the common benefits that the cloud brings, such as scalability,ease of integration, and flexible payment plans, numerous broader industry trendsdiscussed later in this guide are contributing to growth in the market.The StudyThis study is based on extensive primary and secondary research and is divided into 2sections.Section 1 provides analyst commentary on the most important forces affecting theNorth American hosted/cloud contact center market. A number of key trends, includingmovement to the cloud, have been gaining steam for a decade. Others, such ascreative pricing strategies or the creation of app stores for customers to more easilyadd new capabilities from third-party suppliers, are growing in strength. Frost &Sullivan expects that these trends will extend well into 2022.Section 2 highlights and assesses the capabilities of the top-performing NorthAmerican cloud contact center providers. The list is not all-inclusive. Frost & Sullivanchose vendors based on the strength of vision and ability to execute. Some offercomplete contact center solutions while others offer compelling suites focused in areassuch as agent performance optimization. Solution providers are listed in alphabeticalorder.K288-763
Contact Center Buyers Guide, North America, 2019Section 1: Market TrendsAfter decades of focusing on cost-cutting and isolating performance issues in thecontact center, the industry turned its attention toward improving the experience ofcustomers, and then to the workforce that serves them. In this decade, the key trendshave revolved around the concept of people being facilitated by technology.Omnichannel customer care addresses the functional silos and breakpoints in contextcontinuity of the customer journey. Digital transformation—the process of using digitaltechnologies, including advanced communications, to remove cumbersome obstacles togrowth that have built up in an organization over time—is now at the core of strategicplanning. Intriguingly, the use of AI in the contact center has moved front and centeras the industry has matured past using AI as point solutions, such as virtual assistantsand bots, to infusing AI across the customer contact landscape in a variety of waysand methods. Finally, WEM has emerged as a familiar term and essential concept, andis at the heart of the development and application of solutions geared towardimproving EX in the same way as improving the CX.These and other themes are driving innovation and growth across core technologies inthe contact center systems industry, and driving change across areas outside thecontact center as well.The Competitive Landscape Continues to ShiftThere has been an interesting shift in segmentation in the cloud contact centermarket. Premise-based systems once were king, but cloud has since taken over as thepreferred method of deployment. Alternatives to on-premise systems began to emerge20 years ago with cloud-native suppliers such as LiveOps (now Serenova) and Five9.Telecom and networking providers, such as Verizon, Bell Canada, TTEC, and Vonage,added hosted cloud offerings for enterprises in addition to their own BPO offerings.Starting in 2009, a rapid acceleration in new cloud market entrants occurred withcompanies such as 8x8, an example of a company which also brought with it a strongUC offering.The race to the cloud was on, and it forced system providers to answer in turn. Manyadded cloud solutions, such as interactive intelligence, with a CCaaS offer, which wasseparate from premise-based equipment with no integration between the two. Otherestablished contact center providers added cloud assets through multiple acquisitions,including Genesys with Soundbite, Utopy, and Echopass; Mitel with Prairiefyre andShoretel; Verint with Contact Solutions; and NICE with inContact. Still others addedcloud functionality through OEM relationships, such as Aspect utilizing Bright Pattern’stechnology. A few, such as Noble Systems, added cloud options by developing them offK288-764
Contact Center Buyers Guide, North America, 2019of the same code base as their systems, enabling customers to more easily movebetween on-premise and cloud.The next shifts occurred as the industry reimagined and designed agent desktops tostreamline UIs and allow the integration of an increasing array of interaction channels.The concept of omnichannel customer care was born in 2013, promoting the goal of aseamless flow of information along a customer journey. This furthered the accelerationof integrated platforms, and a new generation of cloud platforms emerged eitherthrough the deeper integrations of acquired company technologies or the completerewrite of existing software by providers.The drive to deliver on the promise of omnichannel service along with the increase ininteraction channels and the infusion of new technologies such as process automation,analytics, and AI brought in a wave of third-party application integration and appmarketplace offerings, along with a new generation of platform suppliers includingSharpen and Talkdesk. Shortly thereafter CPaaS cloud providers emerged with APIfirst platforms and a more “build-your-own” mentality, such as those from Amazonwith Connect and Twilio with Flex. These providers, which offer a full range ofcommunication services, often are hosting other contact center providers’ solutions,even as they now provide contact center services of their own.In the meantime, the industry continues to change, most recently with the emergenceof new providers that took advantage of all of the above shifts to build platforms thathave truly integrated functionality from the contact center and UC to the infusion of AIand third-party applications. Notably, Thrio and Edify formally announced suchplatforms in the spring of 2018.This has all made for a very interesting and capability-rich landscape that, for thebuyer, can be confusing. Yet, as the massive installed base of contact centers maturesand needs to be updated, this also means there is something for everyone.Flexible Consumption ModelsThe complexity of the contact center market is also characterized by some fairlyinteresting go-to-market strategies that include new license models, packages, andpricing. For instance, Genesys’s Cloud First initiative, as noted in the Genesys profilelater in the guide, takes the principles of the cloud, such as pay-as-you-go, and theability to burst capacity, to provide customers with the flexibility to shift agent seatlicenses around as needed. For example, if a customer wants to add chat functionality,which might lessen the use of its voice channels, it can shift license usage from voiceto chat, rather than simply adding chat licenses and continuing to pay for unneededvoice channels. Verint provides flexible licensing that takes into account seasonal andrandom burst usage both on-premise and in the cloud. For example, with its NamedK288-765
Contact Center Buyers Guide, North America, 2019Employee Metric-Based Licensing, a customer can start with any solution and onlypurchase the capabilities needed for each agent, such as CTI, messaging, email , orknowledge management.Other suppliers attractively bundle solution options, such as 8x8’s X bundles that costeffectively tie its UC and contact center solutions together.And then there is consumption-based pricing, which upstarts Twilio and AmazonConnect are offering. This pay-for-what-you-consume model enables companies tomore finely tune budgets and make better decisions about what applications to useand when to use them.An interesting example of this model is the one InferenceSolutions uses with its intelligent virtual assistants. Inference’s virtual agents are paidlike human agents, with pricing based on their skill sets: customers pay for thecapabilities, not by the number of minutes consumed by the virtual agent. This enablescompanies to adopt Inference Solutions in a mix-and-match fashion according to theirspecific needs: if a company wants to simply replace an aging IVR system that greetsand routes callers or holds a customer’s place in a call queue, the cost to do so ismuch lower than deploying a virtual assistant that has the full range of capabilities toreplace and offload live resources.If Cloud is King, Hybrid is QueenFrost & Sullivan forecasts continued rapid cloud adoption with growth of 11.4% CAGRduring the 2017–2022 study period.In particular, the area of APO, which includesWEM capabilities and analytics, is forecast to grow 18.9%, and core routing platforms,16.8%.Much to the dismay of many industry pundits, the on-premise market did not show aprecipitous decline; instead, it showed modest growth of 2.7% in 2017. In fact, a fewproviders witnessed a fair increase in on-premise systems sales. Overall, the onpremise market is forecast to have a CAGR of 1.7% during the study period.However, the on-premise and cloud markets are deeply entwined as the majority oflegacy vendors reported that 2017 and 2018 were big years for hybrid deploymentsacross the solution landscape. The rip-and-replace mentality of the early cloud yearshas become a more measured approach for numerous reasons. One often-repeatedexample is that of a company moving to the cloud, but for security or other businessreasons wanting to keep its call recordings on-premise. Another is that of a companywith a contact center that is working fine and is not that old, yet wanting to expandwith newer applications and planning an eventual cloud migration; it will start byadding those new solutions in the cloud, integrated with its existing premise-basedsystems.K288-766
Contact Center Buyers Guide, North America, 2019Guiding Customers through the AI RevolutionAI, as it applies to the contact center, is an umbrella term that encompasses AI, ML,NLU, deep learning, and other related technologies to improve the CX. The overarchingtheme in customer contact this year was the shift from companies talking about AI in anarrow way (focused on point solutions such as speech-enabled IVR or virtualassistants) to the matter of how to effectively plan for and deploy AI-enrichedsolutions across the customer contact landscape in a way that improves both the CXand the EX.A few years ago, just a handful of vendors spoke of AI in this way. Aspect, Genesys,NICE, Nuance, TTEC, and Verizon are among solution providers that spoke of AI as anumbrella term, under which fell both solution creation and the development of AIbased best practices and professional services. Key to this idea was the ability to guidecustomers through what is possible with these technologies and develop solidroadmaps of where they need to be now and in the future with AI.Now the number of companies doing so has mushroomed. Many have business unitsthat focus solely on AI, and some have developed CoEs with a focus on integrating AIinfused solutions into customer environments. Now we have a vast array ofapplications including virtual assistants, predictive routing, process automation, voicebiometrics, assisted and unassisted RPA, and automated forecasting and QA.Frost & Sullivan finds that this trend should only gain strength over the next 5 years ascompanies drive toward improving both the CX and the EX. Developing better selfservice tools so that customers only need to reach out to agents for the more complexinteractions or those requiring judgement and empathy, and tools that help agentsquickly and accurately assist customers, are fertile development areas for takingadvantage of the benefits that AI can bring. To reflect some of the work being done inthis area, many of the provider profiles in this guide include a section on infusing AIacross customer care.ConclusionThe contact center is in the midst of the most interesting and promising time in itshistory. With basic feature development behind us, solution providers are working onwhat might be termed the more humanistic aspects of customer care so as todifferentiate product portfolios. To encompass a broad swath of requirements,providers are also offering a wide array of deployment and pricing options.K288-767
Contact Center Buyers Guide, North America, 2019Choosing a contact center provider is an important decision that must be based on arobust evaluation methodology that includes a thorough check of customer edcompanyandsolutionportfolioinformation as a way to start this process.Bright PatternCompany Background and Current PerformanceBright Pattern was founded in 2010 as a provider of SaaS-based contact centersolutions. The company name came from the idea of “making customer servicebrighter, easier, and faster than ever before,” with a focus on enterprise scalability andtrue omnichannel capabilities and with the goal of offering the greatest simplicity andlowest cost in the industry. Its founders came from within the contact center industryand include some of the original engineers who created enterprise contact centersoftware at Genesys, as well as engineers who developed CRM solutions atFrontRange. The company took an early investment from Aspect to develop on acloud-based platform, the result of which was Zipwire, Aspect’s entrée into cl oudcontact centers.Based in San Bruno, CA, the company has additional offices in California, Australia,Russia, and Japan. The company has 2 data centers in the United States and 1 each inIreland, Australia, Japan, Singapore, and South Africa.After a few years as primarily an engineering-driven company, Bright Pattern in 2017began the expansion of its executive team to focus on building the business moreaggressively from a sales and marketing standpoint.Bright Pattern refreshed itsexecutive leadership by naming board member Michael McCloskey, a former presidentof Kana and Genesys, as CEO. In 2018, two other tenured Genesys executivesfollowed: Ted Hunting after 14 years as senior vice president of marketing, and BrianHays after 18 years as senior vice president of global sales. Since 2018, Bright Patternhas seen its strongest annual revenue growth to date, with the acquisition of keyenterprise accounts such as Daimler Group and Kaiser Permanente; innovative unicorncompanies such as Klook and Weebly/Square; many large, global BPOs; and resellerpartners in North America, APAC, and EMEA. Bright Pattern today has acquired morethan 200 new logos in 26 countries including the United States, Canada, Japan,Singapore, Australia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Italy, and South Africa.K288-768
Contact Center Buyers Guide, North America, 2019Portfolio Description and AnalysisBright Pattern Contact CenterThe Bright Pattern Contact Center is a natively built omnichannel, multitenant platformtargeted at midsize to very large enterprise customers. Built on microservicesarchitecture, it provides omnichannel customer contact across legacy and emerginginteraction channels. The Bright Pattern platform is built on a single unifiedarchitecture with all channels native to the platform.Bright Pattern provides 100% global availability and an active-active topology with10,000-plus concurrent users in a single instance. It runs its platform in all locationsseparated in different geographies, and the system chooses which connections tomake, providing for solid business continuity and disaster recovery. The system alsoallows for a company to comply with regional data security regulations by finding alocal agent in a specific area to keep data local as well.The company claims to be the first cloud-agnostic platform allowing customers theoption to utilize Amazon, Azure, Oracle, Rackspace, and others, or their own datacenters. Bright Pattern runs its own data centers in the United States and mostly usesAWS globally, with other instances being run in partner or customer data centers. Thecompany also boasts measured uptime of 99.998%. Bright Pattern makes upgrades onthe fly without any downtime to users.The platform design combined with best practices has enabled Bright Pattern’scustomers to be up and running very quickly, with minimal IT support. Typicaldeployment windows are 1 to 2 weeks for small to medium-sized businesses and 1 to 2months for large enterprises, including pre-integration with third-party software, Now,Zendesk).Theadministrative interface is designed to let companies change configurations on the fly,such as modifying business rules and journey workflows, without involving excessivetime and cost of IT or professional services.Bright Pattern Contact Center provides a unified omnichannel agent desktop for agentsand supervisors, a contact center administrator application for admins, a systemmanagement application for service providers, and supporting Web applications forbuilding custom forms, chat widgets, automated scenarios, and wallboards. Features ofnote: Bright Pattern Journey Engine. The heart of the platform, it provides businessworkflows to orchestrate journey flows for inbound, outbound, IVR, video, email,chat, mobile in-app, SMS/text messaging, bots, and messengers. The system doescapacity-based routing that works on top of skills-based routing, enablingK288-769
Contact Center Buyers Guide, North America, 2019customers to define different communication channels and how much capacity anagent can handle to be completely busy. The engine also allows for seamlesschannel switching and escalation, and a full range of monitoring, reporting, andquality management consistent across channels. Advanced call handling featuresinclude callback, conversation continuity for dropped calls, and in-call andstandalone SMS messaging between agent and customer. BrightStart Apps. Preconfigured modules or workflows built in the Bright PatternJourney Engine using a simple point-and-click workflow. They were designed asinstantly deployable solution packs that solve common CX issues for particular usecases, making it easy to quickly address particular customer needs with minimalPS. BrightStart apps include conversational IVR, omnichannel digital starter(getting top 2 channels working as one conversation), proactive priority Web chat,and human and chatbot (seamless escalation from bot to agent with full context).Other BrightStart Apps can be easily configured as part of initial customer setupbased on each customer’s desired business use case. Bright AI. Utilizes numerous technologies, including NLU, voice transcription,meaning extraction, and AI and ML, to drive intelligence into applications. Thecompany also has integrations to best-of-breed AI-based products such as IBM,Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. The blending of these technologies enables botsand humans to work as one unit with bots for basic triage and agents added in asneeded with context. Bright AI allows a customer to use any commercial bot orbuild custom bots. The same AI engine helps agents with suggested responses overtext, phone, email, chat, and messengers, and supports desktop automation. Conversational IVR. A natural language, AI-powered IVR solution using best-ofbreed AI technology from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM. By using AI, NLP,and speech analytics on customer calls, it continually learns to improve customerinteractions. Omnichannel Quality Management. A full quality monitoring solution tomeasure quality across all channels and every interaction. Released in Q2 2019, itprovides an intuitive, easy-to-use way of monitoring and coaching agents, andincludes call recording, screen recording, transcripts, supervisor coaching, and endof-interaction surveys. Omnichannel QM can be applied to any channel so that asupervisor can work with the agent in real-time regardless of channel or after thefact by going through scorecards. Call recording is multichannel; it can do speakerseparation, and automatic transcription can be turned on and off. It also providesmultiscreen recording and full control over where data is going or is stored.Omnichannel QM is embedded into the desktop; customers can operate in a singledesktop interface. Because Bright Pattern has all channels native to the platform,K288-7610
Contact Center Buyers Guide, North America, 2019companies are able to have a view of quality across all channels and are able tosee quality management scores such as CSAT and NPS, and sentiment by channel,by journey type (e.g., mortgages vs. credit cards vs. support), or customersegment in simple QM dashboards. Also, using the Journey Manager engine,interactions that fall below given thresholds can be immediately routed to retentionspecialists or supervisors for real-time follow-up. Bright Pattern claims to be thefirst in the industry to provide these metrics across all channels and for allinteractions. OmniWFM. An omnichannel WFM solution for all channels and agent skill setsscheduled for release in Q4 2019. Bright Connect APIs. A set of prebuilt APIs or connectors to all leading CRMs anddatabases, such as MS Dynamics, SFDC, Zendesk, and ServiceNow.Sales and ServicesBright Pattern sells both directly and through partners. Its primary revenue channelhas been through partners, though a more even direct/partner mix is expected as thesales and marketing buildout continues in 2019/20. Bright Pattern is expanding on thepartner side, and starting in October 2018, the company signed 10 of Genesys’s largepartners in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia. As a testament to thestrength of its platform, Bright Pattern also signed a deal with TTEC and expects tohave 4,000 seats by the end of 2019; in addition, TTEC is reselling the product.Bright Pattern’s partnership program includes resellers, business process outsourcers,CRM vendors, and technology partners. Bright Pattern’s partner direction is to remainopen to all key technologies (e.g., CRM, WFO/WFM, AI partners) so that customers canchoose their own best-of-breed solutions. Bright Pattern also is available on all cloudinfrastructure partners (AWS, Azure, Oracle).Because of simplicity in the platform (automation in deployment, configuration) BrightPattern can be implemented with minimal PS. Ongoing changes (e.g., operationalchanges such as updating or modifying journey workflows or business rules) cantypically be made by business users with minimal or no PS support. Bright Pattern PSrevenue is less than 5% of total revenue as an indicator of ease and speed ofdeployment.K288-7611
Contact Center Buyers Guide, North America, 2019StrengthsConcernsAll channels are native to the platform, enablingtrue omnichannel conversations. Omnichannelquality management with omnichannel WFM isplanned for Q4 2019 release.Bright Pattern offers capabilities throughintegrations with all leading WFM vendors. Itrecently launched its own QM offer with WFMbeing released in Q4 2019. As such, theyremain untested in the market.The ability for customers to choose their ownnetwork provides an added layer of flexibilitythat many cloud providers do not offer.Bright Pattern is one of the first providers tooffer customer service messaging apps,particularly in an omnichannel environment.Due to the simplicity of the platform, BrightPattern offers low license costs and professionalservice fees at a fraction of the cost of manyother cloud-based vendors (less than 5% ofrevenue comes from PS).A customer and partner-led organization, BrightPattern’s R&D is heavily driven bycustomer/partner feedback. For instance, itsrecently launched QM product saw 80 topfeature requests from partners.Per Capterra and other “not for pay” customerreview sites, Bright Pattern customers rank thecompany higher than virtually every other cloudcontact center.Customer RecommendationsBest Fit Omnichannel. Companies that are looking to easily offer true omnichannelcapabilities without significant license or PS expense are Bright Pattern targetcustomers. Companies looking at emerging channels such as messengers, ormobile capabilities such as chat, video chat, or document sharing within their appinto their customer care organizations would do well to look at Bright Pattern. Thecompany has adopted a mobile-first strategy, and integrated mobile messagingwith apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger into the platform. Thisprovides customers with in-app messaging and “call me now” buttons that carryK288-7612
Contact Center Buyers Guide, North America, 2019context with the call, as well as multimodal in-app capabilities such as chat, videochat, and document and picture sharing. AI in the Contact Center. For companies that are looking to infuse AI intocustomer contact, Bright Pattern’s Bright AI provides a plethora of choices as tohow to do so—from desktop automation (as well as integration with other RPAvendors) to intelligent bots and messaging applications. In fact, the varioustechnologies can easily be combined (e.g., creating a messaging application thatprovides instant access to a chatbot for assistance).Caution Brand Recognition. Bright Pattern still does not share the same level of brandrecognition of many other cloud contact center providers because it was primarilyfocused on engineering until 2018.But with the recent buildout in sales andmarketing and new marketing efforts such as significant investment in SEO,expanded trade show presence, and industry presentations, Bright Pattern saw astrong uptick in prospects and recognition in H2 2018 and H1 2019.K288-7613
Contact Center Buyers Guide, North America, 2019The Frost & Sullivan StoryFrost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, helps clients accelerate growth and achieve bestin-class positions in growth, innovation, and leadership. The company's Growth Partnership Serviceprovides the CEO and the CEO's growth team with disciplined research and best practices models todrive the implementation of powerful growth strategies.Frost & Sullivan leverages nearly 60 years of experience in partnering with Global 1000 companies,emerging businesses, and the investment community from more than 40 offices on 6 continents toclients accelerate growth by: Delivering the broadest industry and market coverage of any research and consulting firmworldwide—10 industries, 35 sectors, and 300 markets—ensuring that clients understand theirindustry challenges and opportunities, growth opportunities in aligned industries andcompetitive pressures from previously unknown sources; Providing a 360-degree perspective, integrating 7 critical research perspectives to significantlyenhance decision-making accuracy and lower the risk of implementing growth strategies withpoor return; Leveraging extensive contacts in the value chain, including manufacturers, distributors, endusers, and other industry experts;K288-76 Offering a global perspective of opportunities and threats built on regional expertise; Documenting best practices worldwide that overcome tough business challenges; and Partnering with the client’s team to ensure success.14
creative pricing strategies or the creation of app stores for customers to more easily add new capabilities from third-party suppliers, are growing in strength. Frost & Sullivan expects that these trends will extend well into 2022. Section 2 highlights and assesses the capabilities of the top-performing North
