
What are the Critical Capabilities for Contact Centers as a Service?
This year’s report evaluates product and services by looking at 11 critical capabilities across 13 vendors and 5 use cases. For contact centers to be successful, these key requirements or critical capabilities vary in terms of importance across different use cases. Furthermore, this report evaluates product and services with vendor ratings for each capability and vendor scores for each use cases. Here’s the list of the 4 use cases that NICE CXone receives among the highest 2 scores:- Customer Engagement Center (3.66/5)
- Agile Contact Center (3.64/5)
- North America (3.64/5)
- Western Europe (3.61/5)
Importance of a Customer Engagement Center
According to Gartner, the use case for Customer Engagement Center (CEC), “addresses the need for deeper integration with business application software platforms and support for digital channels to provide a stronger customer experience.” Other aspects include support for engaging proactively and reactively as well as strong focus on multichannel contact management, application marketplace and workforce engagement management.
Importance of an Agile Contact Center
Let’s look at the details for Agile Contact Center—one that seems even more important in 2020 and planning for 2021 given current challenges (and opportunities). Gartner explains Agile Contact Center this way: “This use case focuses on the need for customer service managers to rapidly change the setup of the customer service environment in line with operational and budgetary needs.”“Agile contact centers tend to be deployed for more-specific customer service requirements — such as introducing new communications channels, or to set up a support function for a new product or service. In most cases, organizations will already have other contact center technologies deployed. However, the agile suite offers greater flexibility in terms of speed of deployment, scalability and service elasticity. For this use case there is a stronger focus on customer portals and contract elasticity.”
How Can Gartner Critical Capabilities Work for You?
This is an invaluable reference and a very similar to the process that you would likely take when building your own contact center use cases, planning for technology upgrades, and evaluating different offers. Your company may be currently operating in North America but looking to expand into Western Europe (or vice versa). There’s a use case for each of those regions. You may be looking to move to the cloud in order to gain more flexibility and agility—key to innovation and business continuity. There’s a use case for that, too—Agile Contact Center.Out of 13 vendors evaluated, NICE receives among the highest two scores in 4 out of 5 use cases. We believe this not only because of NICE’s overall expertise and Leader position in the Magic Quadrant, but also points to the versatility of CXone as a native-built, fully multitenant cloud customer experience platform with advanced capabilities across a unified suite of applications and a global infrastructure with proven high reliability and scalability for regional and multi-national customers. To read all about the methodology, download the report here.Companion Report to Gartner Magic Quadrant
Every year, Gartner publishes both the Magic Quadrant for CCaaS and the Critical Capabilities for CCaaS. They work together in giving a complete picture of many of the providers in the industry—and what to expect when selecting one over another. NICE achieved the highest overall position for its ability to execute in the just released Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service[2] (CCaaS). According to Gartner, the two reports together offer powerful insights: “Magic Quadrants position vendors in a market, while Critical Capabilities provides a deeper dive into the providers’ product and service offerings. Magic Quadrants contain a broader analysis of the vendors in a market, while the companion Critical Capabilities directly focuses on the product/service offering.” You’ll find all the details and methodology for each of these very sophisticated reports by accessing them in these complimentary reprints.
- Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service, Steve Blood, Drew Kraus, Pri Rathnayake, 9 November 2020
- Gartner, Critical Capabilities for Contact Center as a Service, Drew Kraus, Steve Blood, Pri Rathnayake, 10 November 2020
- Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
- These graphics were published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from NICE
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[1] Gartner, Critical Capabilities for Contact Center as a Service, Drew Kraus, Steve Blood, Pri Rathnayake, 10 November 2020[2] Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service, Steve Blood, Drew Kraus, Pri Rathnayake, 9 November 2020