Trends 2016: The dawn of contact center solution providers

By Sumitr Tyagi

The customer service industry in today’s high tech era has greatly evolved along with the Contact Center Solution Industry, with the latter being synonymous to ‘Unified Communication’. As the year 2015 draws to a close, in order to have a more objective outlook for the year 2016 and discuss the future trends, pondering over the year 2015 would be of great significance.

Prior to delving into industry accomplishments of the past and the future trends, it is however, important to first understand what Unified Communication is. It is a new term and technology creating ripples in the world of technology and marketing. It is defined as the integration of real-time, enterprise, communication services like voice including IP telephony, instant messaging or chat, chat applications, social media platforms, e-mail,  video conferencing and many more forms of communications. Unified Communication is not necessarily a single product, but a set of products and services that provide a consistent unified user-interface and user-experience across multiple devices and media-types.

Wide adoption of Cloud Telephony Technology in various sectors, has paved new ways for the development of the industry in the country. The industry is growing at the rate of 12.4% and is expected to continue with the growth in the coming year too. Gartner or Frost & Sullivan till date haven’t produced any reports illustrating the size of this sector in the country, with about 2 million SMEs in India; the industry players anticipate the market size to be $1 billion. Cloud Telephony has created immense opportunities for small businesses operating out of small towns, new startups, SMEs, individuals who want to compete with their large, urban counterparts.

The industry is now moving towards a multi-channel approach with the objective of enhanced customer service. Apart from voice and text, social media and various applications are taking over the telephony space today.

In a nutshell, the year 2016 is expected to see the dawn of those contact center solution providers for whom QoS and user experience are a primary focus so that companies are able to offer an exceptional customer experience that is expected to stand if not more but at par with brand, price and product.

(The author, Sumitr Tyagi, is founder & CEO, Spark TG)