Customer Experience and the Contact Center

Digital transformation ("DX") is underway across most major verticals. Within the contact center, DX is particularly crucial given the innate focus on customer experience ("CX") and changing trends in the space, which include the expansion of digital and social channels, proliferation of third party cloud applications, and growing customer demands for faster and more personalized service experiences. The contact center sits at a critical point in the CX experience and represents an increasingly important touch point along the customer journey. However, many contact centers lag behind on key IT transformation priorities, despite the push to move from a "reactive" to a "proactive" ecosystem. Contact centers keeping pace with innovation are seeing meaningful improvements in CX by effectively integrating internal and third party software, employing effective data management, deploying contemporary systems architecture, and expanding analytics and automation capabilities. The adoption of AI and robotic process automation ("RPA") technologies is further transforming CX practices and workflows across the contact center.The contact center software market today represents a ~$30B TAM (split between North America and the rest of the world) and is projected to surpass $50B by 2023. Growing investment ($840M in capital in 2019), strong M&A activity ($9.4B in deal value in 2019), and a market focus on CX oriented solutions promise to accelerate the growth of technology businesses in the contact center ecosystem in 2020 and beyond.