North American IP Contact Centers Enter Boom Period.

DUBLIN, Ireland -- Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c45660) has announced the addition of North American IP Contact Center Markets to their offering.

The Frost & Sullivan research service entitled North American IP Contact Center Markets provides an overview of current and forecast spending on IP-based contact center systems, analysis of spending by size of contact centers, and a breakdown of the forces rapidly driving adoption of IP technology in contact centers. In this research service, Frost & Sullivans expert analysts thoroughly examine the IP contact centers and various IP-enabled models, as well as the future role of SIP and presence technologies in the contact center environment.

Market Overview

IP Contact Centers Entering a Boom Period

Despite the slow sales growth rate in the overall North American contact center markets, Internet protocol (IP)-based contact centers are fast entering a boom period. The evolution of IP technology and the creation of effective network readiness assessment services by contact center vendors have helped allay customer fears over migration, giving a positive lift to the markets growth. Market-wide revenue growth has topped 50 percent for the past few years and this rapid growth pace is largely expected to continue over the next two years. Having said that, IP adoption remains uneven with smaller contact centers, be they the sole center for a small company or a smaller distribution center of a larger company, migrating to IP at a much faster rate than larger contact centers. Hence, predicting when adoption rates among larger centers will match those of their smaller counterparts remains a high priority for contact center technology vendors.

A key factor driving the return on investment (ROI) on IP migration is the consolidation of infrastructure for distributed enterprises as well as the associated consolidation of applications such as quality monitoring, customer relationship management (CRM), interactive voice response (IVR), and so on. These result in a simplified architecture that can very easily support changes and upgrades, and also provide a centralized administrative view of all customer contacts. Integration between complimentary applications such as IVR and Web self service is also infinitely easier in this model and in building the case for IP migration, vendors have cited the ease of maintaining less complex environments as a major contributor toward operational cost savings, notes the analyst of this research service. This apart, reduction in long distance transport charges, improvements in the efficiency of agents, and enhanced customer experience are some of the other softer benefits of migrating to IP.

Smaller Contact Centers are Ideal Test Labs for the Benefits of IP

In the past two years, the North American market for IP contact center solutions has grown significantly to represent almost 23 percent of the total North American automatic call distribution (ACD) shipments. In continuance with this trend, more than half of the contact center seat sales in North America are expected to be running on IP by 2008. This massive growth will largely be spurred by the adoption of IP in the small-mid markets and the ACD replacement cycle that began in 2005. Saturation within the large contact center market in North America has resulted in a new focus on the small-mid sector, which is widely viewed as the segment with the greatest potential for the future, says the analyst. Penetrating these markets calls for effective distribution and channel strategies and vendors will critically need to ensure that they provide the easiest and most hassle free migration path with minimum requirement of customer IT resources.

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