Contact Center Themes for 2010 and 2011: SaaS and Social MediaContact Center Themes for 2010 and 2011: SaaS and Social Media

Both are driving product development, and they require a new set of secure multi-level tools that can be accessed by the service providers, customer information technology workers and contact center management.

As I started thinking about writing a blog to wrap up 2010 and preview 2011, it seemed to me that there were two prevalent contact center themes last year that will likely continue to be important in the year ahead. As a sanity check of sorts, I went back and reviewed the 40 or so No Jitter pieces I wrote in 2010 and here are the results. Nine stories had to do with either software-as-a-service (5) or social media (4) handling in the contact center--22 percent of the total.

There are similarities in how SaaS and social media are influencing the contact center market. From a contact center solution provider perspective, both are driving product development. Contact center solutions delivered via SaaS require more than just plopping a server in a data center; notably they require a new set of secure multi-level tools that can be accessed by the service providers, customer information technology workers and contact center management. Specialized contact center SaaS providers, such as EchoPass, inContact, LiveOps and Five9, have long provided these types of tools. Traditional CPE vendors have added these capabilities through internal development (Aspect and Interactive Intelligence), acquisition (Genesys) or partnership (Cisco).

Notably missing from this list is contact center market leader Avaya, who has yet to articulate a definitive SaaS strategy. As an interesting side note, there are customers that continue to use Nortel's Centrex ACD solutions, developed in the early 1990s. Part of the acquired Nortel portfolio, Avaya recently announced end of sale for the Centrex ACD management platform, NES Call Center Management Information (CCMIS). Existing CCMIS customers are being told to migrate to a CPE solution, Avaya's Aura Contact Center 6.1, but they clearly become prime targets for companies with SaaS-based offerings.

Social media also drove product development and partnership in 2010. Cisco took perhaps the boldest move, developing and delivering to the market Cisco SocialMiner. Genesys partners with several companies, notably Lithium, to analyze social media interactions and route them through their contact center engine. Similarly, Interactive Intelligence partners with Buzzient. Aspect, Avaya and Siemens have all announced professional services integrations to route social media through their respective contact center solutions and it is expected that one or more of them will productize these approaches in 2011.

Now to the primary difference I see between SaaS and social media in the contact center: the ability to drive revenue. On this front, SaaS is the clear winner. Both Genesys and Interactive Intelligence have been vocal in their descriptions of the proportion of customers wanting RFP responses that allow the customer a choice between SaaS and CPE. Smaller SaaS-only firms have posted growth that outpaces the overall contact center market. While social media in the contact center may be "sexy," to date it has driven precious little revenue. And I don’t see that changing much in 2011.