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Demand for analytics technology is set to surge in the contact centre applications market across the Asia Pacific in the coming years, new research suggests.
The APAC contact centre applications market registered growth of 5.8 per cent, to reach US$719.5 million in 2019, according to industry research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, with the regional contact centre applications market expected to see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.3 per cent from 2019 to 2026.
This is according to Frost & Sullivan's Digitisation and Cloud Migration Transforming Asia-Pacific Contact Centre Applications Market, Forecast to 2026, which also outlines a couple of top growth areas within the broader contact centre market growth trajectory.
Specifically, the adoption of new technologies, such as analytics, automation, and self-service applications, along with technology up-gradation and cloud migration are driving market growth, the research firm suggested.
Automation and analytics are increasingly popular value additions for contact centres, Frost & Sullivan claimed, as changing consumer behaviour sees customer contact continue to evolve from traditional voice-based interactions to "seamless customer journeys that are proactive, interactive, and persistent".
As such, application vendors are 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 contact centres enhance customer satisfaction, increase first-call resolution 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 centres will consider it a service differentiator,” Frost & Sullivan information and communication technologies research analyst Arpan Bid said.
“Additionally, looking at adoption of contact centre applications by vertical, the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) industry will be the leader in deploying contact centre applications, followed by telecommunications.
"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," he added.
These trends emerge as the onset of COVID-19, unsurprisingly, results in an acceleration of the rate of migration from on-premises solutions to cloud-based services, given the need to provide CX operations remotely.
While COVID-19 is a global force of change, the increased spend on cloud-based contact centre technologies have not been distributed evenly across the broader APAC region.
Although the region is a price-sensitive market, the analyst firm pointed out, the mature markets of Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan are ready to invest significantly to deploy cloud-based, sophisticated applications.
However, required investments are not as large in places like China, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines.
At the same time, though, ending lifecycles for existing vendor platforms, refreshing the applications of core segments, adding new channels and providing richer integrations will help to drive the APAC contact centre applications market, presenting lucrative growth prospects for market participants.
The areas set to see such prospects include new technologies such as predictive analytics and machine learning to enhance capabilities, add value, and remain competitive.
Additionally, easy-to-use contact centre analytics capabilities could be a bright spot, as enterprises increasingly source end-to-end analytics solutions for their business needs.
Work-from-home (WFH) solutions, AI-enabled bots, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and automation tools are also set to surge as contact centres are compelled to increasingly invest in advanced tools to manage the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.
