What Gartner’s 2014 Contact Center Infrastructure Magic Quadrant Means for You
Last week, Gartner released its 2014 Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure (CCI). I am pleased to report that Gartner Magic Quadrant again placed Genesys in the leader quadrant. This achievement marks our sixth consecutive year as a leader, and more importantly our fourth straight year as the most visionary company in the CCI space.
Every year, Gartner evaluates vendors on both completeness of vision and ability to execute, resulting in placement within one of four quadrants that classify vendors as visionaries, niche players, challengers or leaders.
How can Gartner MQs help you as a buyer of CCI solutions?
Being placed “up-and-to-the-right” in Gartner Magic Quadrants is good for vendors, and being the farthest right (greatest completeness of vision) is a very good. But, beyond looking at the vendor strengths and weaknesses, Gartner Magic Quadrant reports also help buyers understand the current state of the industry, including some of the key directions an industry is heading.
Below are some key insights on the current state of the CCI market to consider as you evaluate solutions for your contact center and customer experience initiatives:
Move to ‘All-in-One’ Bundled Suites of Solutions: According to the Gartner report, “Increasingly, contact center managers prefer to purchase much, or all, of their CCI from a single source as a bundle in the pursuit of easier and enduring integration, cradle-to-grave integrated reporting, and easier system management.” Genesys believes this comes in the form of an integrated customer experience platform that enables you to deliver consistent, seamless and personalized interactions across all channels and touchpoints. The benefits include common routing, reporting and analytics regardless of channel, combined with the ability to carry customer context through each interaction along a customer’s journey.
Don’t Confuse Contact Center Infrastructure with CRM – Contact centers are typically the hub of customer experience. It’s where the majority of customer interactions take place, so it’s critical to know what functionality you are getting with Contact Center Infrastructure (CCI) vs. the CRM Customer Engagement Center (CEC) market. According to the Gartner report, CCI solutions can route multi-channel interactions, but “voice and telephony tend to play an important role.” In contrast, CEC solutions “tend to focus on channels other than voice,” according to the report. At Genesys, we believe managing voice interactions is perhaps the most critical channel when it comes to delivering great experiences. The voice channel is where most escalations occur, and for many customers, it’s the only channel where they get true ‘peace of mind’ that a transaction was completed or an issue was resolved. While digital channels are indeed a key focus for many companies, if you do not effectively manage the voice channel as part of a cross-channel customer experience, you are likely missing your biggest opportunity to engage with customers.
Don’t forget about WFO – The Gartner report states that, “Once almost solely limited to point solution providers, WFO functionality is now included in many CCI suites or portfolios.” At Genesys, we’ve found that integrated WFO is in fact a requirement for today’s CCI solutions. From advanced speech analytics to workforce and quality management to automated skills-assessment and training, no CCI solution is complete today without the full range of continuous WFO capabilities.
These are just a few valuable pieces of insight on the state of today’s CCI market. To learn more, download your Gartner 2014 Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure report here, and learn why Genesys is the visionary leader!