This, according to independent market analyst Datamonitor, has caused them to change their sales and marketing strategies, focusing much less on the benefits of the transition from time division multiplexing (TDM) to internet protocol (IP) and much more on topics such as unified communications (UC) for the contact centre and ways to connect the enterprise with the branch and the contact centre. The report “Decision Matrix – Selecting an IP Contact Center Vendor,” which provides a comparative analysis of the top IP contact centre vendors in the enterprise market, says that IP contact centre vendors have begun to offer unified product lines, aiming for common administration and reporting, common user interfaces and functionality far beyond basic routing.
An IP contact centre is any contact centre that does not use traditional circuit switching; that is, all calls are voice-over-IP or are converted from TDM to IP. An IP contact centre leverages the intrinsic benefits of IP communications, including the fact that either or both voice and data communications can be efficiently routed to any customer service agent with access to an IP connection. Through the use of SIP, IP contact centres can detect and route customer communications based on SIP-controlled presence management in place of the traditional automatic call director (ACD).
“In order to offset markedly slower growth in the their traditional stronghold of the large enterprise market, IPCC vendors that had traditionally sold technology for very large contact centres will continue to try to find ways to package and sell products for smaller customers,” says Ian Jacobs, senior analyst for customer interaction technologies at Datamonitor and the report’s author. “This means increased competition for companies that have already created small and mid-sized enterprise products. It also means increased competition for technologically and business process-savvy channel partners from which smaller companies typically buy such products.”