BCC Research recently valued the global cloud contact center market at $14 billion and projects it to reach $43.3 billion by 2026, growing at a compound annual rate of 25.3 percent.
The report notes that the COVID-19 pandemic spurred adoption of cloud-based contact centers, which it says “are being preferred by enterprises to handle inbound and outbound customer communications effectively and to deliver flexibility in managing customer service operations with the help of remote workforce.”
Among the benefits, the report notes that cloud-based solutions provide high levels of business continuity, as cloud service providers often provide backup service as a default offering. Owing to this, businesses can achieve increased productivity, as they can completely focus on the performance of their employees rather than worrying about hardware/system maintenance.
Cloud-based contact centers also provide the benefit of lower capital expenditure requirements, thus making the business more compelling. Deploying a cloud-based solution can bring down the CapEx requirement significantly, as the businesses need not invest in hardware components.
The report also notes that digital transformation and the application of advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), unified omnichannel communications, and machine-to-machine communications via the Internet-of-Things (IoT), have opened a whole new window of opportunity for the contact center market to go further into predictive analytics to help streamline call center experiences for customers and agents.
However, cloud-based offerings bring many unique security issues and challenges, it also pointed out. Data stored in the cloud with third-party providers can be accessed by the provider, thus resulting in poor visibility and limited control over that data.
Though the majority of the companies keep customer data on premises, they still need a connection to the cloud provider to handle screen pops and data lookup, among other things. With the associated threats, certain businesses are still reluctant to incorporate these solutions, which is a challenge for the market, the report concluded.
