North American Hosted Contact Center Market

Additional Information

Report Excerpt

The North American hosted contact center market is coming into its own. More customers are choosing hosted services over the traditional method of buying and installing software on their premise servers. There are several key reasons:

Low total cost of ownership (TCO) and minimal capital investments, along with rapid deployment times and greater flexibility; reduction of IT costs with hosting.

Growing corporate preference to treat software as an operating expense, rather than as a capital expense.

Resolution of issues that have restrained the demand for hosting, such as reliability, security, scalability, and customer acceptability.

The principal contact center systems/applications, delivered as hosted services, include:

Interactive voice response (IVR), both dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) and speech recognition

Automatic call distributor (ACD)

Outbound dialing, including proactive customer contact (PCC)

Live agent chat

Agent performance optimization (APO) applications. These include quality monitoring (QM), performance management (PM), workforce management (WFM), analytics, and enterprise feedback management (EFM)