Adoption in Contact Centers on Accelerated Rise

Yankee:The Next 3 Years Will be Prime Growth Period for VoIP Technologies, Deployment Tripling by end of 2007 .

VoIP penetration in the contact center and sales of related products are poised for significant increase by year end 2007. With 38% of contact centers currently researching and investigating VoIP, the technology deployment rate will likely grow even more dramatically as these investigations drive VoIP conversion decisions in the future. A primary driver of the transition to VoIP is a desire to effectively and efficiently place and manage remote agents; contact centers view the technology as a way to implement an agents anywhere strategy and to manage the remote workers more cheaply and flexibly.

The VoIP adoption rate in North American contact centers will grow from approximately 17% in 2005 to greater than 47% by the end of 2007. In addition, the study predicts that the VoIP penetration rate of agent seats will increase from 16% in 2005 to more than 60% over the next three years. While the significant growth in VoIP adoption in the contact center spans centers of all sizes, the most aggressive segment for growth appears to be centers with 500 or more agent seats. The preferred channels for increased VoIP product acquisitions will be the traditional telecommunications companies and telephony hardware/software vendors over system integrators and value-added resellers. And while customers report data networking vendors will certainly be involved in the planning phases of VoIP, it is unlikely they will overcome traditional contact center providers in application sales in the near term.

'Agents anywhere' including home agents will be the consistent theme for contact center VoIP transition justification. VoIP market growth in the next 3 years is encouraging news for vendors of VoIP contact center solutions. Vendors can best capitalize on this growth opportunity by articulating VoIP lifecycle savings along with voice quality and security issues in their sales and marketing plans. These are areas in which users indicate they need the most help in VoIP acquisition justification. Loyalty and Need for Agents Anywhere Define Contact Center VoIP Adoption Plans Publ 20060814