Data analytics tech set to boom in APAC contact center market

• Analysis technology to enhance the post-pandemic customer service experience, will be central to driving the contact center market boom in APAC

It was a bumper year for the contact center market in some respects, as extended customer care became even more vital since the pandemic meant that clients needed more support, or risk losing their business.

With the growth of contact center applications in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region in particular, a new report is suggesting that the demand for data analysis and other emerging technology applications in the region is set to take off as well.

The contact center application market in APAC, comprising both on-premises and cloud applications, is expected to grow from US$719.5 million in 2019 to US$966.5 million by 2026, at a CAGR of 4.3%. Deployments of more sophisticated, cloud-based applications are expected in the more ‘mature’ markets in the region, including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea.

China, India, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, while not quite as ready to deploy such applications as their counterparts, have significantly fewer required investments to do so, says Frost & Sullivan. Overall, though, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the rate of migration from on-premise solutions to cloud-based services — primarily through the growing need to provide outstanding customer experience remotely.

Just as various industry verticals have begun to realize the crucial importance of having the right data strategy for their business, the contact center is also cottoning on to the benefits of analysis tools to optimize work processes and to prioritize delivering the best customer-oriented results.

But Frost & Sullivan further claims that changing consumer behavior will see customer contact continue to evolve from traditional voice-based interactions to “seamless customer journeys that are proactive, interactive, and persistent”.

As such, contact center application vendors are already introducing new technologies into their product portfolios, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), self-service automation, chatbots, robotic process automation (RPA) and real-time analytics, to help call centers enhance customer experiences, increase first-call resolution rates, and boost overall operational efficiency.

“From an application perspective, inbound contact routing (ICR) will continue to dominate the application market throughout the forecast period, whereas analytics will witness the strongest growth as contact centers will consider it a service differentiator,” says Frost & Sullivan information & communication technologies research analyst Arpan Bid.

Bid also noted that different sectors will approach contact center technology differently. “Additionally, looking at adoption of contact center applications by vertical, the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) industry will be the leader in deploying contact center applications, followed by telecommunications,” he added.

“Similarly, government and education, e-commerce, and healthcare are poised to be the fastest-growing sectors during the COVID-19 pandemic. The retail industry will grow relatively faster after the pandemic.”

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