Even against the backdrop of global recession woes, cost and risk-based resistance to upgrading contact centre systems, and market saturation, the global inbound contact routing (ICR) market continues to grow, reporting a year-on-year growth of 5%.
According to local Alcatel-Lucent premier partner Bytes Communication Systems: the local market has been no exception, and the company has over the last year evidenced growing demand for its mid-market contact centre and enterprise communication server solutions.
“The steady growth in the market comes as a result of a better understanding of the importance and need for robust voice solutions within the business systems landscape,” says John Swanepoel, Customer Interaction Product Manager at Bytes Communication Systems. “To add impetus to this, our vendor partner Alcatel-Lucent was recently named by research company Frost & Sullivan as the 2009 leader for EMEA Inbound Contact Routing Systems Market Penetration.
“The award is a great celebration of the product innovation, marketing and sales strategies that have been invested into the ICR systems at Alcatel-Lucent. And it is this innovation that has allowed us to experience very similar growth with the products throughout Africa,” he adds.
But the accolade hasn't come easily; the market has been facing significant challenges, and according to the Frost & Sullivan report, a vendor's viability, a growing interest in hosted contact centres, the increasing influence of business managers in purchasing decisions, the growing demand of application integration, and an increasing need to do more with less, are just a few of the challenges facing global ICR sales teams.
According to Swanepoel, the real award winners in the Bytes arsenal have been the mid-market contact centre and enterprise communication server products. The Alcatel-Lucent OmniTouch Contact Centre Premium Edition is a mid-market, multimedia IP contact centre solution that enables contact centre managers to simplify operations through an all-in-one interface (Visual CC), providing drag and drop features with access to all the configuration, routing, real-time monitoring and reporting features of day-to-day information.
Conversely, the Alcatel-Lucent OmniTouch Call Centre Office Edition is an all-in-one solution for small to mid-sized businesses designed to enhance customer relationship management and grow with the company's needs.
“As the eyes and ears of vendors on the ground, we have found that it is critical when dealing in Africa to understand the business of your customers and to offer solutions that cater for these,” he states. “Leveraging market-leading contact centre technology from Genesys and designing systems that are flexible and easy-to-use, that deliver a lower cost of ownership, is key to the SME customer.”
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