According to Gartner, the CCaaS market continues to expand at a double-digit rate.
Some may argue that the promise of improving agent experiences, better managing “peaky” contact volumes, and utilizing large language models (LLMs) is proving difficult to ignore.
Yet, many more factors are driving this trend. Some of the most notable include the sustained strategic importance of customer experience, new AI and automation opportunities, and the market’s mounting maturity.
Some vendors do an excellent job in pushing that maturity forward, pushing the boundaries of CCaaS, and influencing the direction of the space.
In the 2023 Magic Quadrant for CCaaS, Gartner has investigated nine prominent providers, uncovering four market leaders that do so.
The Definition of Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)
All SaaS applications that enable and support businesses as they engage with customers fall under the term “CCaaS”.
Providers in this Magic Quadrant bunch these applications together to build CCaaS platforms, leveraging both native apps and integrations with third-party solutions.
As per Gartner, there are four cornerstones of a CCaaS platform – which the analyst previously labeled as its “pillars of great customer service”. These are:
- Contact routing and interactions – These apps pass customers to the best-placed agents – live or virtual – across the optimal engagement channel.
- Resource management – Such tools enhance agent experiences with next-generation workforce optimization (WFO) tooling.
- Process orchestration – These solutions handle complex customer engagements with a degree of personalization.
- Knowledge and insight – Such features uncover new customer, employee, and operational insights that inform next-best actions.
Leading CCaaS vendors will offer native applications across these four fundamental arenas, often with optional integrations to supplementary best-of-breed applications.
These APIs typically come in a marketplace, as each vendor included within the Magic Quadrant study provides.
Such a marketplace also includes integrations to technologies in adjacent markets – such as CRM, UCaaS, ERP, order management, BI, and other platforms.
With all this choice, leading CCaaS vendors allow customers to access more enterprise data and customize service experiences.
However, there is much more to a “leading” vendor than its ecosystem. Further considerations that Gartner accounts for include the overall quality of the product/service, its viability, and sales execution/pricing – alongside many others.
In doing so, Gartner split the nine vendors into four groups: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, and Niche Players.
Gartner Magic Quadrant Leaders
Leaders in the Gartner Magic Quadrant impress with the breadth and depth of their solutions, which many multinational organizations leverage within large-scale enterprise environments. In addition, they demonstrate a robust sales and support presence across the globe, enjoy high brand recognition, and have experienced above-average market growth. This year’s leaders are:
- Genesys
- NICE
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Five9
Genesys
Last year, Genesys made a tough decision to move from three CCaaS platforms to one, focusing its innovation on its Cloud CX platform.
However, that did not endanger its leader status. Instead, it seemingly preserved “strong revenue growth.” Gartner pinpointed this continued growth as a core strength, allowing Genesys to pump funds into public cloud research and development (R&D) and its continued expansion.
The expansion has furthered the vendor’s operational and channel presence across numerous regions. That makes Genesys a “strong contender” for organizations as they consolidate their contact center – according to Gartner.
Finally, the analyst lauds the processes and solutions Genesys offers its customers to support migrations from legacy environments.
NICE
Within its CXone CCaaS platform, NICE offers Enlighten AI, which feeds from a wealth of anonymized intent and action data gathered by the vendor over many years.
As it does so, Enlighten has become increasingly sophisticated, with Gartner noting how its AI models power impressive conversational guidance and journey orchestration capabilities across CXone.
The analyst also highlighted NICE’s specialist consulting across specific sectors and vision for supporting end-to-end digital journeys as core strengths.
Surprisingly, Gartner did not underline workforce engagement (WEM) or robotic process automation (RPA) as essential differentiators despite the vendor’s expertise and product depth in these arenas.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
After successive years as a visionary, AWS has broken into the leader quadrant after sustaining its furious speed of CCaaS innovation and differentiating its pricing approach.
Indeed, Gartner refers to the Amazon Connect pricing model as “the most agile in the CCaaS market,” ensuring customers only pay for the seats and capabilities they leverage.
Moreover, contact centers can trial new features in a playground environment without long-term commitments, encouraging experimentation and innovation across various channels.
Finally, Gartner notes that AWS has now developed a mighty network of development partners to deliver pre-built solutions as an alternative to those that customers piece together themselves.
Five9
Alongside AWS, Five9 has finally broken into the leader quadrant after several years as a challenger. Gartner suggests that its uptick in enterprise deployments is pivotal to this shift.
After all, the vendor once had a reputation for selling to midsized contact centers. Yet, it has undergone a rapid global expansion and now routinely implements CCaaS solutions across service operations with thousands of agents.
A significant draw for those enterprise customers is Five9’s AI competency, with the vendor showcasing its ability to deliver many use cases across various verticals.
Finally, Gartner noted that customers frequently commend Five9 for its post-sale support, which allows them to seep additional value from its offering.
Gartner Magic Quadrant Challengers
Challengers in the Gartner Magic Quadrant have accumulated a considerable install base thanks to their strength in working with customers of a specific size or in a particular sector. However, they typically trail leaders in their multiregional market approach, marketplace representation, and sometimes product development. This year’s challengers are:
- Content Guru
Content Guru
Content Guru is cultivating a reputation as a specialist in complex CCaaS deployments, which have strict resiliency requirements. As such, it has made significant inroads in sectors such as healthcare.
Moreover, the vendor earns plaudits from Gartner for the scalability and flexibility of its platform: storm CONTACT.
Honing in on the latter, the analyst notes how Contact Guru offers an array of integration and cross-platform automation capabilities via its FLOW service builder portal.
Unfortunately, Content Guru appears to lag market leaders in its support for regions beyond Europe, while some customers have voiced concerns over its “a la carte licensing”.
Gartner Magic Quadrant Visionaries
Visionaries in the Gartner Magic Quadrant differentiate their offerings with innovative and often unique capabilities, enabling significant brand awareness. Typically, these vendors pair this with a clear-cut business development strategy. Nevertheless, they typically fall behind leaders in their limited investment potential and scope for international growth. This year’s visionaries are:
- Talkdesk
Talkdesk
Talkdesk has slipped from its status as a Magic Quadrant for the first time in four years, with Gartner citing cautions in its sales and service operations outside of Europe and the US.
Nonetheless, the vendor has sustained its growth curve, drawing in more enterprise customers, having previously – like Five9 – developed a reputation for working with mid-market businesses.
According to Gartner, its attractive prices and innovative functionality have contributed primarily to this – with its expanded contact routing, agent-assist, and low-code capabilities exemplifying the latter.
Finally, the analyst identifies Talkdesk’s pre-packaged, sector-specific CCaaS offerings as another core strength. Each enables relevant and deep integrations alongside imaginative workflows.
Gartner Magic Quadrant Niche Players
Niche Players in the Gartner Magic Quadrant have enjoyed relatively robust growth. Nevertheless, that is often offset by a narrow market focus or a proposition that relies on partners to effectively cover Gartner’s four CCaaS cornerstones. Also, these vendors may be in the early stages of their CCaaS journey, limiting their customer and partner bases. This year’s niche players are:
- Cisco
- Vonage
- 8×8
Cisco
The on-premise contact center stalwart took its time to shift into the CCaaS space, building a cloud-native platform that aligns with its UCaaS and CPaaS solutions.
These tight integrations help democratize CCaaS applications, serving up contact center tools to personnel across the organization and drawing praise from Gartner.
The analyst also shines a positive light on the depth of Cisco’s partner ecosystem and the Webex Contact Center’s “good functionalities” across resource management and analytics.
Nevertheless, Gartner cautions that its overall feature set varies significantly from what the vendor offers on-premise. That can confuse lots of legacy customers that expect a fluid migration.
Vonage
Vonage offers a close Salesforce integration, which Gartner acknowledges as a critical strength of its CCaaS platform – pointing to its towering ratings on the Salesforce AppExchange.
Like Cisco, the vendor also impresses with its collaboration portfolio, which connects the Vonage Contact Center to its UCaaS and CPaaS solutions.
Alongside this, the analyst isolates native analytics as a considerable strength, which enables a wealth of insight into digital service experiences.
However, Gartner refers to Vonage’s CCaaS support outside of Europe as “weak”. Meanwhile, it suggests that Vonage’s “all-encompassing programmable communications platform approach” is unlikely to resonate with many customer support leaders.
8×8
8×8 is a leader in the UCaaS Magic Quadrant, establishing a significant customer base. That has enabled the vendor to build an extensive global support network, which often lends itself to CCaaS – thanks to 8×8’s XCaaS mission.
In addition to the native CCaaS-UCaaS blend, 8×8 also earns plaudits in the Magic Quadrant study for its Microsoft Teams integration.
Meanwhile, Gartner labeled the vendor’s UIs – for agents and supervisors – as “easy-to-use”, which is likely ideal given its many mid-sized contact center customers.
However, the analyst warns that the vendor’s contact center reporting lacks granularity and suggests that lots of its business comes through third-party sales channels. These sometimes lack significant CCaaS expertise.
What Has Changed Since 2022?
Most notably, AWS and Five9 have finally breached the leader quadrant while Talkdesk has slipped into the visionary square.
That change is evident in the following side-by-side comparison with the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant.
Elsewhere, Content Guru cemented its status as a challenger while Cisco teeters on the edge of that very same quadrant. Next year, it may just make it.
Yet, as the likes of Avaya, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and Zoom ramp up their CCaaS pursuits, expect much more disruption in the coming years.
Check out some of our other rundowns of Magic Quadrant reports below:
- Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms 2023
- Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms 2023
- Gartner Magic Quadrant for Customer Service BPO 2022
