Critical Capabilities for Contact Center Infrastructure

Critical Capabilities for Contact CenterInfrastructure, WorldwidePublished: 22 May 2017 ID: G00322646

Analyst(s): Steve Blood, Drew Kraus

Application leaders in customer service should consider today's contactcenter infrastructure as a legitimate option for holistically managing bothemployees and the increasing number of communications channels withcustomers. We present three use cases that represent the most commonconfigurations.

Key Findings■ Although most contact center infrastructure (CCI) providers have a single software stack that

orchestrates contact center and some workforce engagement components, the need to alsosupport best-of-breed components is an essential requirement.

■ Many technology providers are developing parallel product lines for public cloud services usingdifferent technologies. This will present user experience challenges when migrating from on-premises solutions to cloud with the same supplier.

■ New subscription pricing models from premises-based technology providers will enableorganizations to enjoy the consumption and elasticity benefits of public cloud services whileretaining the management and control of a premises-oriented environment.

RecommendationsApplication leaders responsible for planning, selecting and deploying unified communications andcollaboration (UCC) should:

■ Plan for a stronger customer engagement experience by focusing on a tighter integration of CCIwith customer self-service and CRM applications.

■ Reduce the management challenges of contact center solutions by including workforceengagement capabilities as part of your multichannel contact center suite.

■ Mitigate legacy-constrained, voice-centric environments by focusing on the best-of-breedcapabilities of contact center providers.

What You Need to KnowEvaluating contact center infrastructure (CCI) remains a technically complex process. This challengeis further complicated by the different requirements for omnichannel, high availability andintegration, as well as proactive outbound campaigns, performance and sentimental analysis, all ofwhich are key parts of a customer engagement center (CEC).

The contact center market continues to undergo significant consolidation. Vendor consolidation inthe market isn't reducing the number of products (as vendors fear loss of customer confidence andmaintenance revenue from legacy products). Consequently, we have to select single products in theportfolio for analysis in Critical Capabilities. In this research, we focus on a single, on-premisesproduct in each vendor's portfolio that is the most appropriate (but not exclusively) for midsize-to-large contact center environments (from 250 to 5,000 seats).

This Critical Capabilities report is a companion to "Magic Quadrant for Contact CenterInfrastructure, Worldwide," which focuses on customer-premises solutions. In the ratings tables, weinclude references to cloud capabilities (that is, CCI as a hosted, utility consumption model) forinformation only. The research is not designed to support decisions for cloud-based contact centerdeployments, but it is relevant where organizations are looking to utilize existing suppliers intransitioning to cloud services.

Based on our market research and inquiries with clients, Gartner has devised three use cases thatwe believe appropriately reflect most of the decisions that organizations need to make when lookingat CCI:

■ Multichannel compact suite — In this use case, CCI platforms provide all, or most, of the corefunctions in a single suite of software, or as modules for a core appliance server architecture.

■ High-volume call center — When the primary focus is on managing a high volume of phonecalls, organizations need product platforms that can scale, support high levels of resilience anddeliver a best-of-breed experience (specifically for telephone calls, although not exclusively). Inthis model, other channels are managed by other suppliers of customer service capabilities (see"Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center").

■ Customer engagement center — In this use case, deep integration with CRM and socialapplications for a multichannel, single view of the customer is essential for the organization'ssuccess.

Gartner's 10 critical capabilities for CCI evaluation provide the guidelines to help you understandand select your organization's contact center platform for delivering sustainable competitivecustomer service. Although we provide three uses cases for consideration, organizations can adjustthe critical capabilities for a custom analysis. This year, we have added "single server" as a criticalcapability to more readily reflect the demands of organizations that want to simplify management ofsmaller, multichannel solutions. Single server describes the ability to either provide all, if not themajority of, contact center services in a single physical server configuration or as a virtual serverconfiguration.

Page 2 of 22 Gartner, Inc. | G00322646

These criteria have been applied to the 12 vendors evaluated in this research. When reviewing theirsuitability for your organization's customer service infrastructure, use the vendor scores given foreach capability as part of an objective selection process. Buyers should assess and adjust theweightings given according to their own business mandates, performance requirements and futureplans.

Analysis

Critical Capabilities Use-Case Graphics

Figure 1. Vendors' Product Scores for the Multichannel Compact Suite Use Case

Source: Gartner (May 2017)

Gartner, Inc. | G00322646 Page 3 of 22

Figure 2. Vendors' Product Scores for the High-Volume Call Center Use Case



Figure 3. Vendors' Product Scores for the Customer Engagement Center Use Case


Vendors

Aspect

Aspect, a U.S.-headquartered, privately held company, is owned predominantly by Golden GateCapital and Oak Investment Partners. The company is in the process of recasting itself as a "cloudfirst" vendor, offering hosted and/or managed "private cloud" services. In addition, it offers itsAspect Via and Aspect Zipwire contact center as a service (CCaaS) services, but still continues togenerate a significant portion of its product revenue from its premises-based Aspect Unified IPplatform, which is the focus for this report.

Unified IP is a strong unified multimedia contact center application suite for midsize and largeimplementations, with strengths in best-of-breed workforce engagement and self-service voiceapplications. It is also a strong single-server option. The cloud-first focus means that much of


Aspect's R&D investment into product is going into areas other than Unified IP, such as Aspect CXPro, which can lead to more complex administration managing multiple platforms.

Avaya

Avaya is a privately held company with headquarters in Santa Clara, California, U.S. It is owned bythe private equity firms TPG and Silver Lake Partners. In January 2017, Avaya filed for Chapter 11bankruptcy reorganization in the U.S. courts in an effort to reorganize its balance sheet, the result ofwhich will also likely change the company's ownership structure. Avaya has multiple contact centerplatforms, each aimed at a different part of the market. Avaya Oceana, launched in October 2016, isthe focus for this report.

Oceana is Avaya's new multichannel platform with integration and call control for the Call CenterElite voice platform and Oceanalytics for advanced multichannel reporting and customer journeymapping. It is built upon Avaya Breeze, which is an established platform in the Avaya portfolio, withstrong integration and customization capabilities. Oceana, however, currently lacks high availability,proof points of multichannel beyond webchat and reference customers for scale. For these features,the Avaya Aura Platform portfolio is more referenceable.

Cisco

Cisco is a U.S.-based public company with headquarters in San Jose, California. Cisco has threecontact center offerings based on the same software platform, all of which are integrated with itsUnified Communications Manager platform. Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE) is thefocus for this report.

Cisco UCCE is an established, scalable and resilient platform for large contact center deployments.Worklow and its multichannel capabilities are enhanced with the Finesse Agent Desktop. Ciscorelies on partnerships for workforce engagement and, we believe, lacks focus on integrating withthird-party UCC infrastructure to operate any of its contact center software platforms. Thepackaged version of UCCE (PCCE) offers a single-server solution.

Enghouse Interactive

Enghouse Interactive is a division of Enghouse Systems, a public company headquartered inCanada, with shares traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange. It has three distinct contact centerofferings for market segments of business, enterprise and service provider. Enghouse InteractiveCommunications Center (CC), which targets the small and midsize contact center, is the focus forthis report.

Communications Center is exceptionally strong at integrating with existing UC infrastructures,especially Microsoft's Skype for Business Server, with which it is achieving good growth in providing"add on" contact center capabilities to organizations' Skype for Business infrastructure.

Communications Center lacks the ability to operate as a "stand alone" contact center, necessitatinga third-party voice infrastructure. It also lacks scale to satisfy the larger contact center requirements,which are provided by Enghouse Interactive's Contact Center: Enterprise (CCE) platform.


Genesys

Genesys is a privately held company with headquarters in the U.S. and major private equityinvestment from Permira and Hellman & Friedman. Genesys acquired Interactive Intelligence, acontact center and UC vendor, in December 2016, merging largely complementary product linesand providing Genesys with a more mature CCaaS offering. PureEngage is the product evaluated inthis report.

PureEngage is a proven and scalable contact center platform used in some of the more complexcustomer experience environments, which demand deep application integration and workflow. Itsupports third-party UC infrastructure, as well as operating in a "stand alone" environment.PureEngage struggles to scale down to midsize and smaller contact center environments, which aremore effectively served with PureConnect and PureCloud from the Interactive Intelligenceacquisition.

Huawei

Huawei is a privately held company headquartered in China, with shares held primarily by thecompany's employees. Huawei's eSpace contact centers target the small and midsize market, largeenterprises and telecommunications service providers. Its U2980 platform is an all-in-one contactcenter appliance targeted at small and midsize contact centers and large enterprises with software-based media gateways and media resource platforms.

eSpace is a single software application platform that can scale to meet the needs of small to largeenterprise contact centers with a multiple of server and media configurations. It is, however, a highlycomplex construct with multiple SKUs to manage. Huawei has limited exposure of its contactcenter product portfolio outside of China, which is likely to be challenged by regional and culturalrequirements for managing people and resources.

Mitel

Mitel is a public company headquartered in Canada, with shares traded on the Nasdaq and Torontostock markets. Mitel's portfolio of three premises-based contact center solutions targets single-siteoffice deployments through to large enterprise requirements. MiContact Center Enterprise (MiCCE)is the focus for this report.

MiCCE is a multichannel contact center platform that is tightly integrated with the MiVoice MX-ONEIP telephony and Cisco UC platforms. It is also configurable as a single-server option to 250 seats.While it has good scale in multiple server/virtual server configurations, MiCCE relies on VMware faulttolerance redundancy, which limits high-availability deployments to virtual-only virtual serverenvironments. Its SIP-based variant is only scalable to 750 seats.

NEC

NEC is a public company headquartered in Japan, with shares traded on the Tokyo StockExchange. NEC's flagship multimedia contact center offering is Univerge Contact Center, whichsupports customers ranging from SMBs to companies with thousands of call center agents.


Univerge Contact Center is a component of the Univerge 3C UCC platform, with support formigrating customers with legacy NEC communications platforms. High availability is achievedlargely through custom integration on a customer basis. Univerge Contact Center does not yetsupport the emerging social communication channels or SMS.

SAP

SAP, which has headquarters in Germany, is a public company with shares traded on the Frankfurtand New York stock exchanges. SAP Contact Center is positioned within the SAP Hybris CustomerEngagement and Commerce (CEC) business unit and delivers omnichannel customer engagementintegrated with SAP's business application and SAP Cloud offerings.

SAP Contact Center has a scalable, multichannel architecture which, coupled with SAP CRM,represents a tightly integrated customer experience. Its single-server option enables it to beconsidered as a compact contact center offering, though most of the investment is going into SAPHybris as a cloud-based platform. SAP continues to rely on partners for workforce engagement.

Unify

Unify is a wholly owned subsidiary of Atos, a global system integration and outsourcing businessheadquartered in France, with multiple contact center offerings. OpenScape Contact CenterEnterprise (OSCCE) is the platform evaluated in this report.

OSCCE is a software platform that resides either on OpenScape voice platforms or integrated to athird party IP-PBX platform using its Preferred Device feature. Scalability of OSCCE is reasonablebut it lacks the high availability typically required at scale. The Open Media framework strengthensthe multichannel interaction capability. There is no single server variant for OSCCE; instead, this isprovided as an application of the OpenScape Enterprise Express solution.

Vocalcom

Headquartered in France, Vocalcom is a privately owned company with Apax Partners as themajority shareholder. Vocalcom uses a common software platform to power its premises and cloud-based contact center offerings. Vocalcom Virtual Contact Center (VVCC) is the platform evaluated inthis report.

VVCC is based on Vocalcom's Hermes software platform, which offers reasonable scalabilitybetween distributed server or virtual server environments. It has strong support for managingmultiple media channels including SMS and social media. It has single-server configuration to 120seats. Vocalcom continues to rely on partners for workforce engagement.

ZTE

Headquartered in China, ZTE is a public company with shares traded on the Hong Kong StockExchange. Its Next Generation Call Center (NGCC) suite supports highly scalable multimediacontact center capabilities, with strong support for both inbound and outbound operations in cloud-and premises-based configurations. AnyService@ZXNGCC is the platform evaluated in this report.


AnyService@ZXNGCC is a scalable, fault-tolerant multichannel platform with a tight integration tocarrier IMS infrastructures. It has strong support for social media and SMS. It lacks focus onintegration with UC infrastructure other than its own. ZTE has limited exposure of its contact centerproduct portfolio outside of China, which is likely to be challenged by regional and culturalrequirements for managing people and resources.

Context

The contact center market is rapidly evolving. Traditionally siloed markets are aligning to providegreater business value and elevated levels of customer engagement. Support of social processes toassist customers is emerging.

In addition, the CCI market and the contact center workforce engagement market, both of whichwere previously siloed, are converging. Here, CCI vendors combined product developments and, insome cases, commercial partnerships are starting to satisfy organizations' demands for completesolutions addressing the needs of customer experience through contact management andemployee experience through workforce engagement.

During the last five to 10 years, many enterprises have looked to either their CRM vendors or best-of-breed specialists to provide these customer interaction channels. One reason for this was thatvendors could support interactions that were more customized to individual consumers based ontheir inherent integration with CRM records.

A second reason was that these vendors could better support automated or partially automatedinteractions across these channels, often aided by a more robust knowledge managementcapability to support detailed and individualized responses.

However, voice-based interactions continue to make up a significant portion of interactions incontact centers today. As such, as companies look to evolve service and support to become morecustomer-centric across all interaction channels, some are recognizing the potential benefits ofacquiring both their voice and nonvoice channels as a package from a single vendor, offering aconsistent experience across all customer interaction.

CCI, no longer siloed by vendor or function, is required to interoperate with the types ofcommunication that are becoming natively available from major application and cloud providers,such as Microsoft, Google, IBM, SAP, Oracle and Salesforce. Evolving business expectations ofhow customer service should be delivered means that supporting communications should be nativefrom any IT platform.

Gartner's critical capabilities ratings take into consideration the abilities of leading vendors'products worldwide. This means your organization must evaluate and debate each capability ratingas it applies to your specific business context. The category ratings will assist in shortlistingprospective vendors for your CCI.


Product/Service Class Definition

Gartner defines call center infrastructure (CCI) as the products (equipment, software and services)needed to operate call centers for basic telephony support and contact centers for multichannelsupport. This type of solution is used by customer and employee service and support centers,inbound and outbound telemarketing services, help desk services, government-operated supportcenters, and other types of structured communications operations. Contact center interactions canbe people-assisted or automated self-service; for example using interactive voice response (IVR)and speech-recognition technologies. These channels for interaction use live agents and messagingtechnologies, and include voice, web, email, IM, web chat, video and mobile devices (see "MagicQuadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure, Worldwide").

Contact center platforms are largely IP-based and use LANs and WANs to connect advisors tocallers or customers. They can be either a best-of-breed technology, excelling in the support of asingle contact center channel (for example, automatic call distribution [ACD]), or a suite solution thatsupports multiple channels (for example, voice, email, IVR, web chat, video chat or social mediaengagement). Increasingly, there is also a focus on satisfying self-service requirements using mobileapplications in place of, or to complement, IVR. Because managing social media engagement isonly just emerging as a competence — with several other sources for solutions — IT plannersshould evaluate whether the offer from CCI vendors is mature enough to benefit from beingincluded in an integrated suite solution.

The application platform itself generally consists of software deployed on either a dedicated server/server cluster, using standards-based hardware, or virtualized software instances on a standards-based virtual server infrastructure. Connectivity is achieved using proprietary or standards-baseddesk phones or softphones on PCs. Connectivity to the public switched telephone network (PSTN)is provided with the vendor's own proprietary or third-party media gateways, while connectivity to anext-generation network, using SIP, is achieved via a proprietary or third-party session bordercontroller.

Critical Capabilities Definition

Today's CCI has six core functions:

■ Queuing — To satisfy demand for contact with a finite number of resources, queuing principlesare used to introduce a wait time as part of the contact management.

■ Routing — Determining the priority and order of contact answer depends on the skills ofadvisors, the context of the communication, and the availability of staff. Although many contactcenters employ a first-in, first-out routing methodology, an increasing number of organizationsare customizing this to account for customer profiles and the value of transactions.

■ Interaction — To ensure that the customer service experience is optimized, advisors needaccess to tools that provide insight into the customer and contact history through all availablechannels, as well as policy, advice and support on how to manage the interaction. This can beachieved by tight integration with CRM or via customer service and support (CSS) applications,a dedicated interaction interface or a desktop client.


■ Recording — This involves capturing the content of each transaction for compliance andtraining purposes, as well as understanding more about the "voice of the customer." Analyticscan be used in real time and historically to spot keywords, understand intent and actaccordingly for a better customer experience.

■ Reporting — Managing the adherence of the contact center operation in real time, and usingdetailed historical data to forecast future demand for planning, requires reporting capabilitiesthat are intuitive, easy to use and accessible to other business applications and workforceplanning tools. Analytics products that extend beyond simple activity capture provide contactcenter operations with the ability to automatically review employee activities and suggestpossible improvements.

■ Administration — Administering the day-to-day operations of a contact center requires theability to shift resources to support unplanned changes in contact volume, manage employeework schedules, and configure call flows, announcements and skills.

These six functions can be applied to a single channel, such as telephony, or to all channels as in amultichannel solution. To satisfy these functions, Gartner has devised a set of 10 critical capabilitiesby which IT organizations should evaluate their existing and prospective CCI providers.

Architecture

This critical capability refers to how the CCI system and its software solution environment aredesigned for either a centralized or distributed architecture.

Architecture also includes how the communications components interconnect and interoperate withadjunct contact center applications, the use of open standards, and virtualization technologies andinfrastructures.

Scalability

This is a CCI ecosystem's ability to grow seamlessly to cost-effectively accommodate manythousands of agents.

These agents may be concentrated in particular locations or widely distributed geographically, butact as a single domain. Scalability also includes the ability to manage high volumes of transactionsin real time.

High Availability

This refers to design options offered by a CCI solution to maintain a high level of call and sessiontraffic, total system reliability and uptime.

Vendor continuity options for CCI include diverse, networked contact centers supporting localsurvivability, redundant servers, clustering and core system components, local survivable gatewaysand processors, and SIP or PSTN diversity/failover options. A high-availability system supportsstateful call failure in an event that a component or site goes down, which means all current


interactions will stay up when a failure occurs. Some vendors support only next-call failover, whichmeans all existing interactions are dropped, and all callers and agents are required to call and log inagain, which can be very disruptive to business operations.

Management

This includes administration of related CSS, CRM, workforce management, workforce engagement,quality assurance, analytics, diagnostics, management reporting and remote support.

Management refers to the diagnostic tools and programs supported by the contact center system inits core locations, remote offices and operating locations. These tools and programs includediagnostic software, as well as remote monitoring and diagnostic tools, designed to support andmanage agents, and to anticipate and correct system alarms and fault conditions in the underlyingtelephony and calling applications before or as they occur. The tools include support for agents withstaff work shift rosters and operational performance metrics, as well as strategic data mining andanalytical applications for planning.

Open Standards

Open standards in communications and APIs are essential for integrating the CCI with ITapplications and business processes.

Demand is strongest in support of self-service applications in the voice and mobile channels.However, open standards also include integration with business applications and othercommunications channels for a holistic customer experience. Examples of open standards forcommunications include SIP, SIMPLE, VXML, CCXML and WebRTC. Standards-based APIs includeweb services (SOAP, XML and REST), as well as C++, Java and Microsoft's .NET framework.

UCC Integration

With more employees working virtually, improving operational effectiveness across the organizationis a key demand for UCC technologies.

This involves IM, video and desktop sharing, and telephone calls. The opportunity to link this muchcloser to the contact center can support improvements in customer service, too. The opportunity fora customer service advisor to contact subject matter experts, to engage them in calls withcustomers, or to have a sideline IM conversation as part of fulfilling the customer transaction canimprove first-contact resolution, reduce the time to serve, and reduce repeat contacts.Organizations looking to adopt this practice will need to have a tight integration between their CCIand their choice of platforms for UCC (see "Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications").

Workflow

This process, by which contact is distributed to CSS advisors and managed for consistency andquality, is more than just inbound call center contact.


A great customer experience doesn't end when the advisor puts the phone down or sends an emailresponse. It often requires other employees from other operations to do their part in a timely mannerto ensure the customer experience doesn't falter, or to develop an agreed-on timeline so follow-upaction occurs.

Organizations often focus here on the proactive communications applications — outbound contactsthrough multimedia channels as part of the customer service process. However, this can extendfurther into workflow-centric applications. These will be most appropriate in environments where thecustomer fulfillment process is time-bound, and there is a strong process link between front-officeand back-office operations.

Multichannel

Managing end-to-end customer experiences and multiple channels requires a 360-degree view ofcustomer contact and transaction history.

A single view of customer contact history is a key requirement of an omnichannel experience andmust be available to each group of employees providing customer service. This is particularlyimportant in the contact center, where the staff members who provide customer support on thetelephone have a skill set that's different from employees providing support through chat or video.

CCI is not the only platform that organizations have available for supporting multichannel (see"Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center"). However, it is often the onlyplatform available to provide a unified management queue among all the customer communicationschannels. Organizations looking to ensure a consistent approach to managing customer contactneed to ensure tight integration between the communications channels and the sources of data andcustomer information critical to providing a good customer experience.

Workforce Engagement

This encompasses the recording, evaluating and scheduling of employees engaged in creatingcustomer service experiences.

Workforce engagement solutions contain complementary functions designed to improve theperformance of CECs by means of optimized deployment of appropriately trained and motivatedagents. These functions range from recruitment and scheduling to evaluation and training. Byadding intelligence (such as speech analytics) to each workforce engagement function, everythingfrom recruitment to scheduling to training can be optimized.

Single Server Deployment

This is the provision of all contact center services as a single server deployment.

For smaller contact center deployments, typically sub-150 seats, it is useful for organizations todeploy single server or single virtual server configurations for ease of management and cost. Thiscritical capability is a trade-off between the number of functions that may be deployed in single-


server variant and the scalability of the deployed applications. While some single-server instancesmay scale beyond 500 seats, this requirement is aligned more closely with the need to support themultichannel compact suite use case.

Use Cases

Based on our market research and inquiry with clients, we have devised three use cases that webelieve appropriately reflect most of the decisions organizations need to make when looking at CCI.

Multichannel Compact Suite

These CCI platforms provide core functions in a single suite of software, or as modules for coreappliance server architectures.

Multichannel compact suites tend to be deployed for more specific customer service requirements— to introduce new communications channels, or to set up a support function for a new product orservice. In most cases, organizations will already have contact center technologies deployed;however, the suite often scales to a lower size of deployment and becomes more cost-effective. Theability to administer and manage contacts across multiple channels is a major benefit to a smallerbusiness in which administration is not a full-time function.

Suite solutions tend not to scale as large as dedicated best-of-breed platforms; however, they aremore complete in interoperability among the different components, such as single scriptingapplication for managing contact flows, common reporting schema and administration across allcontact channels.

Although some vendors have scaled their suite solutions to meet the needs of more than 1,000concurrent seats, the "sweet spot" for the compact suite is in the sub-500-seat opportunities.

High-Volume Call Center

Where there are high call volumes to manage, organizations need platforms that can scale, supporthigh resilience levels and deliver best-of-breed experiences.

In this scenario, organizations are likely to separate their call-center infrastructures from othercommunications channels, so as not to disrupt the high-performing, finely tuned, telephone-basedsetup. As with compact suites, these same organizations are still engaging in multichanneloperation, only as a separate operation to their call centers.

High-volume call centers can typically scale to more than 1,000 agents per platform, with the abilityto network to provide holistic service to more than 5,000 seats.

Customer Engagement Center

The CEC refers to a logical set of business applications and technologies that are engineered toprovide CSS, regardless of the interaction channel.


The goal of the CEC is not only to provide reactive service to customers as they move amongcommunications channels (including social media) while retaining the customers' context, but alsoto apply the appropriate business rule to determine the next-best action, information or processwith which to engage the customers.

When the contact center is a core component of a CEC, the infrastructure must support strongintegration with business application platforms to deliver on business rules, maintain customercontext and become an integral part of the customer interaction cycle. It's feasible, but notessential, that the CCI provides management for social media and other contact channels. The keyto making CCI a core component of a CEC is support for open standards. This enablesorganizations to mix their preferred choice of supplier for contact, while delivering a holistic view ofthe CEC. In this context, the CCI isn't limited by size or location. It spans both large and smallcontact center environments.

Vendors Added and Dropped

Added

None

Dropped

ALE, Altitude Software and ShoreTel were dropped because they didn't meet the new revenuecriteria for inclusion. Interactive Intelligence was dropped because it was acquired by Genesys.Presence Technology was dropped because it was acquired by Enghouse Interactive.

Inclusion CriteriaCCI vendors have been included in this research based on the following criteria:

■ Premises-based contact center with product and service revenue of more than $45 million in2016.

■ Evidence of sales, marketing and operational presence (that is, operating sales offices andactively selling contact center solutions — not just selling solutions in one region for delivery inother regions; and supporting multiple language web presence) in a minimum of threegeographical regions including Asia/Pacific, Eastern Europe, Japan, Latin America, Middle Eastand Africa, North America and/or Western Europe. This may be achieved directly and/or throughchannel partners.

■ Significant market share in the specified geographic markets.

■ Sufficient sales and operational presence to support market objectives.

■ Demonstrable solutions in a minimum of five of the CCI portfolio areas defined in the MarketDefinition/Description section of the accompanying Magic Quadrant.


■ Ability to generate significant interest by leading client market segments.

Each vendor was required to provide five customer references using multichannel routing (not justvoice).

Table 1. Weighting for Critical Capabilities in Use Cases

Critical Capabilities Multichannel CompactSuite

High-Volume CallCenter

Customer EngagementCenter

Architecture 5% 15% 5%

Scalability 0% 25% 5%

High Availability 5% 25% 10%

Management 15% 25% 10%

Open Standards 5% 5% 15%

UCC Integration 5% 0% 10%

Workflow 5% 0% 15%

Multichannel 15% 0% 15%

Workforce Engagement 10% 5% 10%

Single Server Deployment 35% 0% 5%

Total 100% 100% 100%

As of May 2017


This methodology requires analysts to identify the critical capabilities for a class of products/services. Each capability is then weighed in terms of its relative importance for specific product/service use cases.

Critical Capabilities Rating

Each of the products/services has been evaluated on the critical capabilities (see Table 1) on a scaleof 1 to 5; a score of 1 = Poor (most or all defined requirements are not achieved), while 5 =Outstanding (significantly exceeds requirements).

The following vendors were included in this review:

■ Aspect


■ Avaya

■ Cisco

■ Enghouse Interactive

■ Genesys

■ Huawei

■ Mitel

■ NEC

■ SAP

■ Unify

■ Vocalcom

■ ZTE


Table 2. Product/Service Rating on Critical Capabilities

Critical Capabilities

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Ava

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Cis

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Gen

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Hua

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Voca

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ZT

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Architecture 4.0 4.0 5.0 2.5 5.0 3.5 3.0 3.0 3.5 3.5 3.5 4.0

Scalability 4.0 3.0 5.0 3.0 5.0 4.0 4.0 3.0 3.5 3.5 3.5 4.0

High Availability 4.0 2.5 5.0 3.5 5.0 4.0 3.0 3.5 4.0 2.0 3.0 4.0

Management 4.0 3.5 4.5 4.0 4.0 3.0 3.5 3.0 3.5 3.0 3.0 3.0

Open Standards 3.0 5.0 4.0 3.5 5.0 4.0 3.5 3.0 4.0 3.5 3.5 3.0

UCC Integration 4.5 3.5 3.5 5.0 4.0 3.0 3.0 3.0 3.0 3.5 3.0 3.0

Workflow 3.5 4.5 4.0 3.0 4.5 3.0 2.5 3.5 4.5 3.5 2.5 2.5

Multichannel 3.5 3.5 4.5 3.0 4.5 3.0 3.5 2.0 4.5 4.0 4.0 3.0

Workforce Engagement 3.5 3.0 2.5 2.0 3.5 3.0 2.5 2.0 2.0 1.5 2.0 3.0

Single Server Deployment 3.5 1.0 1.5 4.0 1.0 3.5 4.0 3.5 3.0 1.0 3.5 1.5

As of May 2017


Table 3 shows the product/service scores for each use case. The scores, which are generated bymultiplying the use-case weightings by the product/service ratings, summarize how well the criticalcapabilities are met for each use case.


Table 3. Product Score in Use Cases

Use Cases

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Hua

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Multichannel CompactSuite 3.65 2.68 3.20 3.53 3.15 3.30 3.45 2.98 3.40 2.35 3.25 2.55

High-Volume Call Center 3.93 3.25 4.70 3.28 4.68 3.63 3.38 3.08 3.58 2.90 3.18 3.65

Customer EngagementCenter 3.68 3.60 4.00 3.35 4.30 3.35 3.18 2.90 3.70 3.05 3.13 3.05

As of May 2017


To determine an overall score for each product/service in the use cases, multiply the ratings in Table2 by the weightings shown in Table 1.

Gartner Recommended ReadingSome documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.

"Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure, Worldwide"

"Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center"

"The Essential Shift From Workforce Optimization to Workforce Engagement Management"

"Magic Quadrant for Workforce Engagement Management"

Evidence

Scoring for the 10 critical capabilities given here for the evaluation and selection of CCIs wasderived from Gartner's independent research on CCIs in recent years. The quantification for thescoring is supported by research in adjacent markets, including contact center operations,telephony, UCC, data communications and data centers, as well as face-to-face meetings incontact center installations, and feedback from Gartner clients and competitive vendors duringinquiries. Each vendor in this research responded in detail to a comprehensive, annual primary-research survey questionnaire administered by experienced analysts. This provides an objectiveprocess for considering the vendors' suitability for your business' customer service activities.


Critical Capabilities Methodology

This methodology requires analysts to identify the critical capabilities for a class ofproducts or services. Each capability is then weighted in terms of its relative importancefor specific product or service use cases. Next, products/services are rated in terms ofhow well they achieve each of the critical capabilities. A score that summarizes howwell they meet the critical capabilities for each use case is then calculated for eachproduct/service.

"Critical capabilities" are attributes that differentiate products/services in a class interms of their quality and performance. Gartner recommends that users consider theset of critical capabilities as some of the most important criteria for acquisitiondecisions.

In defining the product/service category for evaluation, the analyst first identifies theleading uses for the products/services in this market. What needs are end-users lookingto fulfill, when considering products/services in this market? Use cases should matchcommon client deployment scenarios. These distinct client scenarios define the UseCases.

The analyst then identifies the critical capabilities. These capabilities are generalizedgroups of features commonly required by this class of products/services. Eachcapability is assigned a level of importance in fulfilling that particular need; some sets offeatures are more important than others, depending on the use case being evaluated.

Each vendor’s product or service is evaluated in terms of how well it delivers eachcapability, on a five-point scale. These ratings are displayed side-by-side for allvendors, allowing easy comparisons between the different sets of features.

Ratings and summary scores range from 1.0 to 5.0:

1 = Poor: most or all defined requirements not achieved

2 = Fair: some requirements not achieved

3 = Good: meets requirements

4 = Excellent: meets or exceeds some requirements

5 = Outstanding: significantly exceeds requirements

To determine an overall score for each product in the use cases, the product ratings aremultiplied by the weightings to come up with the product score in use cases.

The critical capabilities Gartner has selected do not represent all capabilities for anyproduct; therefore, may not represent those most important for a specific use situation


or business objective. Clients should use a critical capabilities analysis as one ofseveral sources of input about a product before making a product/service decision.


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Documents

Critical Capabilities for Contact Center Infrastructure