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Magic Quadrant for Contact Centre as a Service, Western Europe

Whatever you may think of the accuracy or otherwise of predictions made by industry analysts in general, it’s clear that Gartner has gained a good degree of credibility with its regular, industry specific ‘magic quadrant’ analysis.

I recently came across Gartner’s offering entitled Magic Quadrant for Contact Centre as a Service (Western Europe) (¹). Despite the rather clumsy acronym of CCaaS, it’s makes good reading – if you’re mentioned in the report.

Well, Aculab isn’t mentioned in the report. However, that’s hardly surprising as Aculab isn’t offering a CCaaS product per se. But we are involved.

What is pleasing (and not surprising) is that Aculab’s technology is being used by 40 percent of the contact centre service providers identified in Gartner’s report. We’re certainly happy about that. We’re particularly pleased, because our underpinning technology – telephony media processing resources – is being used by providers in the magic Challenger, Niche Player and Visionary quadrants.

It’s clear from Gartner’s CCaaS market report that IT leaders and customer service organizations have a range of competitive, cloud-based offers to consider in place of more traditional, premises-based contact centre infrastructure. That is music to our ears. Why is that?

That’s because – by inference – it confirms Aculab as being involved in those competitive offerings. And it’s because, rather than being seen merely as “those guys who make DSP boards,” Aculab can be viewed as a partner, whose current, highly relevant products add value to acclaimed offerings in a key market sector.

CCaaS solutions offer the same functions and capabilities as ‘bricks and mortar’ contact centre infrastructure. The functionality is used in the public and private sectors by a wide variety of customer and employee service and support centres, and by inbound and outbound telemarketing services for such things as collections and subscriptions.

The underlying technology that Aculab, as a specialist provider, contributes to the CCaaS providers includes functionality related to the following:

• Automatic call distribution (ACD) and computer-telephony integration
• Interactive voice response (IVR) and self-service portals
• Operational support applications, including recording and analytics
• Outbound dialling and live speaker / answering machine detection
• Support of virtual operations (multi-tenant and multi-instance) and remote agents
• Elasticity to dynamically add and subtract users

Gartner’s magic quadrant report has narrow criteria for inclusion, which makes being a dot on its graphic an achievement, of which the named providers, justifiably, can be proud. However, the benefits to be gained from using a CCaaS solution are no secret known only to members of an exclusive magic circle.

If you are a contact centre solution provider of any description, you can benefit from Aculab’s added value, which will contribute to the business benefits your solution offers your customers.

Note 1: https://www.gartner.com/doc/3151325/magic-quadrant-contact-center-service

Note that Gartner’s research publications consist of the opinions of its research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact, and that Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications.