As leading tech vendors Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Zoom, and Cisco enter the CCaaS market, it’s worth examining their strategies to see how they stand out, win over customers and build their market share against the established industry giants. While it is still early days, we look at some of the plans from these tech giants to guess what might be next on the horizon for the CX industry.
Are Google and Microsoft getting vendors to come to them?
When Microsoft and Google announced that they were throwing their hat into the CCaaS space, it set the industry abuzz with experts predicting that one of the two companies would become a dominant player in this industry.
While that has not come to pass, both companies are making an impact in a different way: by encouraging CX providers to build their solutions around their technology.
Let’s take Microsoft, for example; while its native CCaaS solution, Microsoft Dynamics for Customer Service 365, has not generated a lot of buzz, its chat-based application, Microsoft Teams, has grown, to the point where CX vendors are integrating Teams into their applications because many of their clients are using it.
This means Microsoft could be issuing licenses of their own and getting CCaaS providers to come to them, carving out their own place in the market.
Google is also establishing their own foothold in a similar way. The search giant’s CCaaS solution has not made a lot of waves, but its speech recognition capabilities are an interesting proposition that could bolster already existing platforms, making them a tempting offering for most CX vendors.
By leveraging already existing technologies, Google and Microsoft are creating a situation where CX vendors are coming to them. However, we may see this strategy change, particularly if Google goes through with their plan to acquire UJET.
Zoom, Amazon, and CISCO are making serious waves
On the other hand, we are seeing companies like Zoom make serious bids to build out their own market niche. Zoom already enjoys tremendous success thanks to its brand name and is looking to build on it with Zoom Contact Center, first announced in March 2022.
Zoom already offers omnichannel use cases and video interaction, but the recent acquisition of Solvvy could mean conversational AI capabilities could be a new feature on the platform.
Similarly, Amazon is making ambitious expansions into the CCaaS space with its own solution.
The company launched several new capabilities in June, which include the ability to build and deploy chatbots in their CCaaS platform using AI, automatically open new use cases and log agent actions, and the option to deliver marketing messages, appointment notifications, and delivery alerts using automation.
However, despite the upgrades, Cisco seems to be ahead of the pack in the CCaaS market (for the moment at least) because their solution is already competing with offerings from more established contact center providers, including omnichannel support and automation.
Who leads the race?
While Cisco, Amazon, and Zoom are establishing their own space in the market through aggressive expansion, it is still too early to say who is a definitive leader. Particularly because Microsoft and Google are one expansion away from becoming competitive players in the industry. Furthermore, established stalwarts in the industry will have to improve their offerings to remain competitive.
Regardless of who wins the race, it will be CX users that benefit from it for they have a rich selection of omnichannel solutions to choose from.