News & Events

How Cisco Led The Contact Centre Market in 2017

  • 19 February, 2018

Article, Cisco, News, Unified Collaboration

Today’s contact centre/call centre

 

A contact centre is a central point from which all customer contacts are managed. The contact centre should have have an omnichannel experience consisting of telephony, chat, email, video and AI. It is often part of a business’s overall strategy of interacting with their customers.

Customer service is a priority for businesses everywhere as consumers now are more demanding than they ever used to be. Therefore, it’s vital that firm’s contact centres are efficient and operate smoothly, as there’s nothing worse than a customer calling about a problem, just to encounter another problem.

We are going to look at some of last year’s financial outcomes of the major players in the contact centre market and discuss how Cisco overtaken competition to become the market leader in the US.

The financial details

 

Statistics from last year show that Cisco commanded the contact centre market in 2017 after overtaking Avaya in the second half of 2016. You can see how much Cisco impacted this industry in the graph below.

Cisco contact center graph center

How Cisco did it

 

There was obviously many factors affecting the great success of Cisco last year. The following four reasons are what I, personally, think were the most affecting causalities. I came to these conclusions after some research and discussions with a few of our contact centre customers.

1

Avaya's financial troubles

It’s no secret that Avaya, one of the leading contact centre specialists, experienced some financial difficulties in recent years, culminating in their restructuring and the subsequent sale of the networking arm to Extreme Networks last year. Such a tumultuous period has affected consumers confidence in Avaya which has likely resulted in a degree of lost business. We’ll see what the future holds for Avaya now that they have restructured, but for the time being at least, Cisco has a distinct edge, particularly concerning contact center R&D, which Cisco have invested heavily in recently.

2

Cisco’s targeting of the mid-market

Since 2014, Cisco have been supporting mid-market customers with the arrival of their Packaged Contact Centre Enterprise (PCCE) solution which support up to 2000 agents. Previously, Cisco only supported either Contact Centre Express (UCCX) which handles up to 400 agents or Contact Centre Enterprise (UCCE), up to 12000 agents. The PCCE solution is a compacted and easier to consume contact centre which makes it more attractive to mid-market businesses. It is also more affordable than other solutions. You can also read here about how to save money on VMware licensing by upgrading to PCCE 11.6.

3

Cisco’s evolution of AI’s

With help from their partners, Cisco have been developing their self-service strategy, including AI’s and Bots with IVR’s (Interactive Voice Response) allowing interactions with business customers to be almost as natural as a real human conversation, rather than just speaking to another drone. AI is currently a main focus for the whole technology industry and as time goes on, these systems will only get better and better.

4

Robust cloud options

Cisco’s cloud support has consistently delivered an exceptional service for their customers and partners. Now that their cloud options are available to smaller companies and is doing particularly well. The support for these customers is offered using Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution for contact centres in an HCS environment.

Conclusion

 

I can only foresee Cisco’s market lead increasing in 2018. They will likely begin dominating the Europe and Asia markets this year as we all know Cisco’s market share trends typically emerge from the US and then continues to the rest of the world.

If you are interested in how Cisco Contact Centre would fit into your environment, then don’t hesitate to get in touch. We would love to have a conversation with you and answer any questions you may have.

dylan profile

Dylan James is a Senior Collaboration Architect at Tesrex. He is a CCIE qualified engineer with an IT career spanning over 11 years. He specialises in Collaboration, Mobility and Remote Access.

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