The Best Senior Teams Thrive on Disagreement

Most team leaders try to build cohesion on their teams. Through team-building exercises and the careful establishment of norms and processes, leaders aim to create a culture of trust, psychological safety, and good feeling.

But should enterprise leadership teams also pursue cohesion? To explore this question, over the course of six years, we surveyed senior-most leadership teams 99 times at companies representing a variety of industries, including financial services, food and beverage, energy, technology, healthcare, and retail. Each team member responded to over 110 items that focused on their team’s capability and performance.

The specific domains of capability and performance were based on

previous research

, including:

• Team structure
• Team processes
• Team results
• Team dynamics

Most teams (55 teams comprised of 700+ senior executives) also responded to items focused on organization performance — comparing themselves to industry peers — and included dimensions such as Sales and Revenue Growth, New Product Development, and Market Share.

We expected to replicate the importance of cohesion in this unique context. We were wrong. Results from our research indicate that while concepts like internal cohesion and psychological safety are important to team performance, they are not the most critical at the enterprise level. Rather, it is the ability to manage conflicting tensions — as opposed to seeking cohesion — that is the most predictive of top-team performance.

What are the key tensions?

Top teams need to navigate greater complexity and uncertainty than teams lower on the org chart. Perhaps that ‘s why we found the highest-performing senior teams are those that recognize and skillfully navigate three key tensions. These tensions are embraced as polarities to be managed rather than problems to be solved.

Risk vs. Results. Delivering results in the short term and taking risks that offer payoff in the long term are daily realities for top teams. The highest-performing teams excel at both. More specifically, we examined what differentiated the top 25% of performing teams from the rest of the teams we studied when it came to taking calculated risks to lead the industry. High-performing teams realize 10% greater market share and report 22% better performance when it comes to developing new products. They take a long-term view, place strategic bets, and invest money and infrastructure to systematically pursue them.

They don ‘t just take risks, however. They are also clear and knowledgeable about how to best leverage the core strengths of the business, creating circumstances where both risk and day-to-day delivery can peacefully coexist. Our highest-performing teams reported 6.5% greater profitability against their competitors and 7.5% better sales and revenue growth. As much as they strive to lead the industry and are responsible for delivering results, they also possess an ability to learn and grow from mistakes rather than judge and punish — in essence, they know where best to innovate and what to leave alone.

Although executive teams readily acknowledge this, the two activities often run counter to each other, especially when it comes to financial investment, alignment of resources, and allocation of talent. Dr. Volker Schulte, group director of manufacturing and technology at power solutions company Aggreko, understands well this potential conflict and believes that teams that create a culture of embracing both risks and results are most effective. As he told us, “Creating a culture of performance and results is pivotal. But this culture needs to coexist with strategic bets led by the top of the house that get an enterprise operational plan behind them. Both are pivotal to ongoing success.”

External vs. Internal Pull. An organization ‘s ability to look outward and upward as well as downward and inward is a well-documented success factor and one that takes on even greater importance given the pace with which our world is changing. Based on our research, one of the best predictors of high-performing teams is their ability to consistently scan the external environment for consumer, competitor, and industry knowledge and to use that knowledge to adapt. More specifically, we found that high-performing teams achieved greater sales and revenue growth (10.6%) and better development of new products (8.2%). The best teams do not lose the focus of the external world when getting pulled into internal transformations, change, and turmoil. In fact, they may use external pressures and realities as a springboard for internal execution.

David Craig, president of financial and risk business, Thomson Reuters, and a key architect of the merger between Thomson and Reuters, notes that their customer focus was critical to driving internal execution: “At a time where we needed significant internal transformation, we were lucky in that our largest customers and the financial industry were in crisis and demanding change. Our team leveraged this to align our internal transformation.”

In other words, these high-performing top teams create mechanisms to stay attuned to the internal pulse of the organization. They enable employees to expose barriers to execution that senior leaders can then address, and they are agile in shifting internal resources to respond to changing business situations. Our research found that companies who leveraged core strengths to grow the business achieved better profitability and market share. This is not to say this shift is easy, and further, it is one that requires support and engagement from the top. As Mr. Craig notes, “It was tough, demanding, and required painful choices. We ensured senior leaders took exec-sponsor roles for customers, forcing them to engage externally.”

Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Innovation. Finally, the success of a top team rests heavily on its ability to innovate. No surprise there. However, the nuance that emerged from our research suggests that top-performing senior teams manage the tension between leading and directing innovation while also engaging and empowering the broader organization. They provide frameworks and make essential decisions but recognize that those closer to the customer often possess the best insights. Enterprise leadership teams that are highly effective at creating conditions for bottom-up innovation benefitted from greater employee engagement (9.5%) and better quality of new products (12%). Teams who effectively drive top-down innovation demonstrated better sales and revenue growth (5%) and market share (4.5%).

Schulte notes that “for innovation to happen, senior teams need to create a culture where those who are closest to the customer can share, challenge, and feel heard.” He also notes that the responsibility of enterprise leadership teams is to “create empowering cultures of micro-innovation in conjunction with clear, top-down plans to best set up organizations for success.”

How can a team embrace these tensions?

We are not tolling the final bell on the long-held notion that cohesion is critical to team performance. Indeed, for enterprise-wide teams to successfully traverse the tensions outlined above, trust and positive team dynamics are foundational. In fact, our results were consistent with this notion, in that teams with high levels of trust, transparency, a team-first mentality, and collective pride perform better along several dimensions (e.g., overall organizational performance, employee engagement).

However, in a business environment that requires a different approach to enterprise leadership, our results challenge the assumption that cohesion is the most critical. On the contrary, embracing, navigating, and living with tension is most strongly related to organizational performance.

So, how does a leader ensure their team fully embraces these tensions? Our experience suggests three key team behaviors that support a full and successful embracing of these tensions.

• Reframe tension and dialogue openly. The best-performing teams view tension simply as a typical part of the job in today ‘s business environment. Well-managed tension is therefore an indicator of strong performance rather than a signal that something is wrong. As such, creating a clear dialogue around conflicts, trade-offs, and compromise is critical. While you want the team to operate from the standpoint of what ‘s best for the enterprise rather than what ‘s best for one ‘s individual function, often the way you get there is by people in each department laying out their concerns. Instead of seeing this as a fight, or assuming bad intentions, be clear that this is a normal part of the process.
• Keep the customer front and center. Best-performing teams and organizations use consumer needs as their North Star. Unified customer focus provides a sense of alignment, clarity, and cohesion needed to navigate inevitable complexities and tensions. Embedding the work of the team in the world of the customer can make all the difference. You can do this through structure (e.g., customer advisory boards, executive sponsorship) as well as culture.
• Hold the team accountable for fostering innovation. For enterprise leadership teams, we see the responsibility of fostering innovation too often taking a back seat to day-to-day minutia and firefighting. This is especially troublesome given that the need for innovation and agile adaptation has never been greater. Paddy Miller and Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg, authors of Innovation as Usual, note that “focus beats freedom” for enterprise-wide innovation. In other words, senior leaders must first create frameworks and focus for bottom-up innovation to occur in an intentional and productive way.

Critical Capabilities for Contact Center Infrastructure, WoRL

Pu: 22 My 2017 

Summary

Application leaders in customer service should consider today's contact center infrastructure as a legitimate option for holistically managing both employees and the increasing number of communications channels with customers. We present three use cases that represent the most common configurations.

Overview

Key Findings

• Although most contact center infrastructure (CCI) providers have a single software stack that orchestrates contact center and some workforce engagement components, the need to also support best-of-breed components is an essential requirement.
• Many technology providers are developing parallel product lines for public cloud services using different technologies. This will present user experience challenges when migrating from on-premises solutions to cloud with the same supplier.
• New subscription pricing models from premises-based technology providers will enable organizations to enjoy the consumption and elasticity benefits of public cloud services while retaining the management and control of a premises-oriented environment.

Recommendations

Application leaders responsible for planning, selecting and deploying unified communications and collaboration (UCC) should:

• Plan for a stronger customer engagement experience by focusing on a tighter integration of CCI with customer self-service and CRM applications.
• Reduce the management challenges of contact center solutions by including workforce engagement capabilities as part of your multichannel contact center suite.
• Mitigate legacy-constrained, voice-centric environments by focusing on the best-of-breed capabilities of contact center providers.

What You Need to Know

Evaluating contact center infrastructure (CCI) remains a technically complex process. This challenge is further complicated by the different requirements for omnichannel, high availability and integration, as well as proactive outbound campaigns, performance and sentimental analysis, all of which are key parts of a customer engagement center (CEC).

The contact center market continues to undergo significant consolidation. Vendor consolidation in the market isn't reducing the number of products (as vendors fear loss of customer confidence and maintenance revenue from legacy products). Consequently, we have to select single products in the portfolio for analysis in Critical Capabilities. In this research, we focus on a single, on-premises product in each vendor's portfolio that is the most appropriate (but not exclusively) for midsize-to-large contact center environments (from 250 to 5,000 seats).

This Critical Capabilities report is a companion to "Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure, Worldwide," which focuses on customer-premises solutions. In the ratings tables, we include references to cloud capabilities (that is, CCI as a hosted, utility consumption model) for information only. The research is not designed to support decisions for cloud-based contact center deployments, but it is relevant where organizations are looking to utilize existing suppliers in transitioning to cloud services.

Based on our market research and inquiries with clients, Gartner has devised three use cases that we believe appropriately reflect most of the decisions that organizations need to make when looking at CCI:

• Multichannel compact suite — In this use case, CCI platforms provide all, or most, of the core functions in a single suite of software, or as modules for a core appliance server architecture.
• High-volume call center — When the primary focus is on managing a high volume of phone calls, organizations need product platforms that can scale, support high levels of resilience and deliver a best-of-breed experience (specifically for telephone calls, although not exclusively). In this model, other channels are managed by other suppliers of customer service capabilities (see"Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center" ).
• Customer engagement center — In this use case, deep integration with CRM and social applications for a multichannel, single view of the customer is essential for the organization's success.

Gartner's 10 critical capabilities for CCI evaluation provide the guidelines to help you understand and select your organization's contact center platform for delivering sustainable competitive customer service. Although we provide three uses cases for consideration, organizations can adjust the critical capabilities for a custom analysis. This year, we have added "single server" as a critical capability to more readily reflect the demands of organizations that want to simplify management of smaller, multichannel solutions. Single server describes the ability to either provide all, if not the majority of, contact center services in a single physical server configuration or as a virtual server configuration.

These criteria have been applied to the 12 vendors evaluated in this research. When reviewing their suitability for your organization's customer service infrastructure, use the vendor scores given for each capability as part of an objective selection process. Buyers should assess and adjust the weightings given according to their own business mandates, performance requirements and future plans.

Analysis

Critical Capabilities Use-Case Graphics

Figure 1. Vendors' Product Scores for the Multichannel Compact Suite Use Case

Source: Gartner (May 2017)

Figure 2. Vendors' Product Scores for the High-Volume Call Center Use Case

Source: Gartner (May 2017)

Figure 3. Vendors' Product Scores for the Customer Engagement Center Use Case

Source: Gartner (May 2017)

Vendors

Aspect

Aspect, a U.S.-headquartered, privately held company, is owned predominantly by Golden Gate Capital and Oak Investment Partners. The company is in the process of recasting itself as a "cloud first" vendor, offering hosted and/or managed "private cloud" services. In addition, it offers its Aspect Via and Aspect Zipwire contact center as a service (CCaaS) services, but still continues to generate a significant portion of its product revenue from its premises-based Aspect Unified IP platform, which is the focus for this report.

Unified IP is a strong unified multimedia contact center application suite for midsize and large implementations, with strengths in best-of-breed workforce engagement and self-service voice applications. It is also a strong single-server option. The cloud-first focus means that much of Aspect's R&D investment into product is going into areas other than Unified IP, such as Aspect CX Pro, which can lead to more complex administration managing multiple platforms.

Avaya

Avaya is a privately held company with headquarters in Santa Clara, California, U.S. It is owned by the private equity firms TPG and Silver Lake Partners. In January 2017, Avaya filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization in the U.S. courts in an effort to reorganize its balance sheet, the result of which will also likely change the company's ownership structure. Avaya has multiple contact center platforms, each aimed at a different part of the market. Avaya Oceana, launched in October 2016, is the focus for this report.

Oceana is Avaya's new multichannel platform with integration and call control for the Call Center Elite voice platform and Oceanalytics for advanced multichannel reporting and customer journey mapping. It is built upon Avaya Breeze, which is an established platform in the Avaya portfolio, with strong integration and customization capabilities. Oceana, however, currently lacks high availability, proof points of multichannel beyond webchat and reference customers for scale. For these features, the Avaya Aura Platform portfolio is more referenceable.

Cisco

Cisco is a U.S.-based public company with headquarters in San Jose, California. Cisco has three contact center offerings based on the same software platform, all of which are integrated with its Unified Communications Manager platform. Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE) is the focus for this report.

Cisco UCCE is an established, scalable and resilient platform for large contact center deployments. Worklow and its multichannel capabilities are enhanced with the Finesse Agent Desktop. Cisco relies on partnerships for workforce engagement and, we believe, lacks focus on integrating with third-party UCC infrastructure to operate any of its contact center software platforms. The packaged version of UCCE (PCCE) offers a single-server solution.

Enghouse Interactive

Enghouse Interactive is a division of Enghouse Systems, a public company headquartered in Canada, with shares traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange. It has three distinct contact center offerings for market segments of business, enterprise and service provider. Enghouse Interactive Communications Center (CC), which targets the small and midsize contact center, is the focus for this report.

Communications Center is exceptionally strong at integrating with existing UC infrastructures, especially Microsoft's Skype for Business Server, with which it is achieving good growth in providing "add on" contact center capabilities to organizations' Skype for Business infrastructure.

Communications Center lacks the ability to operate as a "stand alone" contact center, necessitating a third-party voice infrastructure. It also lacks scale to satisfy the larger contact center requirements, which are provided by Enghouse Interactive's Contact Center: Enterprise (CCE) platform.

Genesys

Genesys is a privately held company with headquarters in the U.S. and major private equity investment from Permira and Hellman & Friedman. Genesys acquired Interactive Intelligence, a contact center and UC vendor, in December 2016, merging largely complementary product lines and providing Genesys with a more mature CCaaS offering. PureEngage is the product evaluated in this report.

PureEngage is a proven and scalable contact center platform used in some of the more complex customer experience environments, which demand deep application integration and workflow. It supports third-party UC infrastructure, as well as operating in a "stand alone" environment. PureEngage struggles to scale down to midsize and smaller contact center environments, which are more effectively served with PureConnect and PureCloud from the Interactive Intelligence acquisition.

Huawei

Huawei is a privately held company headquartered in China, with shares held primarily by the company's employees. Huawei's eSpace contact centers target the small and midsize market, large enterprises and telecommunications service providers. Its U2980 platform is an all-in-one contact center appliance targeted at small and midsize contact centers and large enterprises with software-based media gateways and media resource platforms.

eSpace is a single software application platform that can scale to meet the needs of small to large enterprise contact centers with a multiple of server and media configurations. It is, however, a highly complex construct with multiple SKUs to manage. Huawei has limited exposure of its contact center product portfolio outside of China, which is likely to be challenged by regional and cultural requirements for managing people and resources.

Mitel

Mitel is a public company headquartered in Canada, with shares traded on the Nasdaq and Toronto stock markets. Mitel's portfolio of three premises-based contact center solutions targets single-site office deployments through to large enterprise requirements. MiContact Center Enterprise (MiCCE) is the focus for this report.

MiCCE is a multichannel contact center platform that is tightly integrated with the MiVoice MX-ONE IP telephony and Cisco UC platforms. It is also configurable as a single-server option to 250 seats. While it has good scale in multiple server/virtual server configurations, MiCCE relies on VMware fault tolerance redundancy, which limits high-availability deployments to virtual-only virtual server environments. Its SIP-based variant is only scalable to 750 seats.

NEC

NEC is a public company headquartered in Japan, with shares traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. NEC's flagship multimedia contact center offering is Univerge Contact Center, which supports customers ranging from SMBs to companies with thousands of call center agents.

Univerge Contact Center is a component of the Univerge 3C UCC platform, with support for migrating customers with legacy NEC communications platforms. High availability is achieved largely through custom integration on a customer basis. Univerge Contact Center does not yet support the emerging social communication channels or SMS.

SAP

SAP, which has headquarters in Germany, is a public company with shares traded on the Frankfurt and New York stock exchanges. SAP Contact Center is positioned within the SAP Hybris Customer Engagement and Commerce (CEC) business unit and delivers omnichannel customer engagement integrated with SAP's business application and SAP Cloud offerings.

SAP Contact Center has a scalable, multichannel architecture which, coupled with SAP CRM, represents a tightly integrated customer experience. Its single-server option enables it to be considered as a compact contact center offering, though most of the investment is going into SAP Hybris as a cloud-based platform. SAP continues to rely on partners for workforce engagement.

Unify

Unify is a wholly owned subsidiary of Atos, a global system integration and outsourcing business headquartered in France, with multiple contact center offerings. OpenScape Contact Center Enterprise (OSCCE) is the platform evaluated in this report.

OSCCE is a software platform that resides either on OpenScape voice platforms or integrated to a third party IP-PBX platform using its Preferred Device feature. Scalability of OSCCE is reasonable but it lacks the high availability typically required at scale. The Open Media framework strengthens the multichannel interaction capability. There is no single server variant for OSCCE; instead, this is provided as an application of the OpenScape Enterprise Express solution.

Vocalcom

Headquartered in France, Vocalcom is a privately owned company with Apax Partners as the majority shareholder. Vocalcom uses a common software platform to power its premises and cloud-based contact center offerings. Vocalcom Virtual Contact Center (VVCC) is the platform evaluated in this report.

VVCC is based on Vocalcom's Hermes software platform, which offers reasonable scalability between distributed server or virtual server environments. It has strong support for managing multiple media channels including SMS and social media. It has single-server configuration to 120 seats. Vocalcom continues to rely on partners for workforce engagement.

ZTE

Headquartered in China, ZTE is a public company with shares traded on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Its Next Generation Call Center (NGCC) suite supports highly scalable multimedia contact center capabilities, with strong support for both inbound and outbound operations in cloud- and premises-based configurations. AnyService@ZXNGCC is the platform evaluated in this report.

AnyService@ZXNGCC is a scalable, fault-tolerant multichannel platform with a tight integration to carrier IMS infrastructures. It has strong support for social media and SMS. It lacks focus on integration with UC infrastructure other than its own. ZTE has limited exposure of its contact center product portfolio outside of China, which is likely to be challenged by regional and cultural requirements for managing people and resources.

Context

The contact center market is rapidly evolving. Traditionally siloed markets are aligning to provide greater business value and elevated levels of customer engagement. Support of social processes to assist customers is emerging.

In addition, the CCI market and the contact center workforce engagement market, both of which were previously siloed, are converging. Here, CCI vendors combined product developments and, in some cases, commercial partnerships are starting to satisfy organizations' demands for complete solutions addressing the needs of customer experience through contact management and employee experience through workforce engagement.

During the last five to 10 years, many enterprises have looked to either their CRM vendors or best-of-breed specialists to provide these customer interaction channels. One reason for this was that vendors could support interactions that were more customized to individual consumers based on their inherent integration with CRM records.

A second reason was that these vendors could better support automated or partially automated interactions across these channels, often aided by a more robust knowledge management capability to support detailed and individualized responses.

However, voice-based interactions continue to make up a significant portion of interactions in contact centers today. As such, as companies look to evolve service and support to become more customer-centric across all interaction channels, some are recognizing the potential benefits of acquiring both their voice and nonvoice channels as a package from a single vendor, offering a consistent experience across all customer interaction.

CCI, no longer siloed by vendor or function, is required to interoperate with the types of communication that are becoming natively available from major application and cloud providers, such as Microsoft, Google, IBM, SAP, Oracle and Salesforce. Evolving business expectations of how customer service should be delivered means that supporting communications should be native from any IT platform.

Gartner's critical capabilities ratings take into consideration the abilities of leading vendors' products worldwide. This means your organization must evaluate and debate each capability rating as it applies to your specific business context. The category ratings will assist in shortlisting prospective vendors for your CCI.

Product/Service Class Definition

Gartner defines call center infrastructure (CCI) as the products (equipment, software and services) needed to operate call centers for basic telephony support and contact centers for multichannel support. This type of solution is used by customer and employee service and support centers, inbound and outbound telemarketing services, help desk services, government-operated support centers, and other types of structured communications operations. Contact center interactions can be people-assisted or automated self-service; for example using interactive voice response (IVR) and speech-recognition technologies. These channels for interaction use live agents and messaging technologies, and include voice, web, email, IM, web chat, video and mobile devices (see"Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure, Worldwide" ).

Contact center platforms are largely IP-based and use LANs and WANs to connect advisors to callers or customers. They can be either a best-of-breed technology, excelling in the support of a single contact center channel (for example, automatic call distribution [ACD]), or a suite solution that supports multiple channels (for example, voice, email, IVR, web chat, video chat or social media engagement). Increasingly, there is also a focus on satisfying self-service requirements using mobile applications in place of, or to complement, IVR. Because managing social media engagement is only just emerging as a competence — with several other sources for solutions — IT planners should evaluate whether the offer from CCI vendors is mature enough to benefit from being included in an integrated suite solution.

The application platform itself generally consists of software deployed on either a dedicated server/server cluster, using standards-based hardware, or virtualized software instances on a standards-based virtual server infrastructure. Connectivity is achieved using proprietary or standards-based desk phones or softphones on PCs. Connectivity to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) is provided with the vendor's own proprietary or third-party media gateways, while connectivity to a next-generation network, using SIP, is achieved via a proprietary or third-party session border controller.

Critical Capabilities Definition

Today's CCI has six core functions:

• Queuing — To satisfy demand for contact with a finite number of resources, queuing principles are used to introduce a wait time as part of the contact management.
• Routing — Determining the priority and order of contact answer depends on the skills of advisors, the context of the communication, and the availability of staff. Although many contact centers employ a first-in, first-out routing methodology, an increasing number of organizations are customizing this to account for customer profiles and the value of transactions.
• Interaction — To ensure that the customer service experience is optimized, advisors need access to tools that provide insight into the customer and contact history through all available channels, as well as policy, advice and support on how to manage the interaction. This can be achieved by tight integration with CRM or via customer service and support (CSS) applications, a dedicated interaction interface or a desktop client.
• Recording — This involves capturing the content of each transaction for compliance and training purposes, as well as understanding more about the "voice of the customer." Analytics can be used in real time and historically to spot keywords, understand intent and act accordingly for a better customer experience.
• Reporting — Managing the adherence of the contact center operation in real time, and using detailed historical data to forecast future demand for planning, requires reporting capabilities that are intuitive, easy to use and accessible to other business applications and workforce planning tools. Analytics products that extend beyond simple activity capture provide contact center operations with the ability to automatically review employee activities and suggest possible improvements.
• Administration — Administering the day-to-day operations of a contact center requires the ability to shift resources to support unplanned changes in contact volume, manage employee work schedules, and configure call flows, announcements and skills.

These six functions can be applied to a single channel, such as telephony, or to all channels as in a multichannel solution. To satisfy these functions, Gartner has devised a set of 10 critical capabilities by which IT organizations should evaluate their existing and prospective CCI providers.

Architecture

This critical capability refers to how the CCI system and its software solution environment are designed for either a centralized or distributed architecture.

Architecture also includes how the communications components interconnect and interoperate with adjunct contact center applications, the use of open standards, and virtualization technologies and infrastructures.

Scalability

This is a CCI ecosystem's ability to grow seamlessly to cost-effectively accommodate many thousands of agents.

These agents may be concentrated in particular locations or widely distributed geographically, but act as a single domain. Scalability also includes the ability to manage high volumes of transactions in real time.

High Availability

This refers to design options offered by a CCI solution to maintain a high level of call and session traffic, total system reliability and uptime.

Vendor continuity options for CCI include diverse, networked contact centers supporting local survivability, redundant servers, clustering and core system components, local survivable gateways and processors, and SIP or PSTN diversity/failover options. A high-availability system supports stateful call failure in an event that a component or site goes down, which means all current interactions will stay up when a failure occurs. Some vendors support only next-call failover, which means all existing interactions are dropped, and all callers and agents are required to call and log in again, which can be very disruptive to business operations.

Management

This includes administration of related CSS, CRM, workforce management, workforce engagement, quality assurance, analytics, diagnostics, management reporting and remote support.

Management refers to the diagnostic tools and programs supported by the contact center system in its core locations, remote offices and operating locations. These tools and programs include diagnostic software, as well as remote monitoring and diagnostic tools, designed to support and manage agents, and to anticipate and correct system alarms and fault conditions in the underlying telephony and calling applications before or as they occur. The tools include support for agents with staff work shift rosters and operational performance metrics, as well as strategic data mining and analytical applications for planning.

Open Standards

Open standards in communications and APIs are essential for integrating the CCI with IT applications and business processes.

Demand is strongest in support of self-service applications in the voice and mobile channels. However, open standards also include integration with business applications and other communications channels for a holistic customer experience. Examples of open standards for communications include SIP, SIMPLE, VXML, CCXML and WebRTC. Standards-based APIs include web services (SOAP, XML and REST), as well as C++, Java and Microsoft's .NET framework.

UCC Integration

With more employees working virtually, improving operational effectiveness across the organization is a key demand for UCC technologies.

This involves IM, video and desktop sharing, and telephone calls. The opportunity to link this much closer to the contact center can support improvements in customer service, too. The opportunity for a customer service advisor to contact subject matter experts, to engage them in calls with customers, or to have a sideline IM conversation as part of fulfilling the customer transaction can improve first-contact resolution, reduce the time to serve, and reduce repeat contacts. Organizations looking to adopt this practice will need to have a tight integration between their CCI and their choice of platforms for UCC (see "Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications" ).

Workflow

This process, by which contact is distributed to CSS advisors and managed for consistency and quality, is more than just inbound call center contact.

A great customer experience doesn't end when the advisor puts the phone down or sends an email response. It often requires other employees from other operations to do their part in a timely manner to ensure the customer experience doesn't falter, or to develop an agreed-on timeline so follow-up action occurs.

Organizations often focus here on the proactive communications applications — outbound contacts through multimedia channels as part of the customer service process. However, this can extend further into workflow-centric applications. These will be most appropriate in environments where the customer fulfillment process is time-bound, and there is a strong process link between front-office and back-office operations.

Multichannel

Managing end-to-end customer experiences and multiple channels requires a 360-degree view of customer contact and transaction history.

A single view of customer contact history is a key requirement of an omnichannel experience and must be available to each group of employees providing customer service. This is particularly important in the contact center, where the staff members who provide customer support on the telephone have a skill set that's different from employees providing support through chat or video.

CCI is not the only platform that organizations have available for supporting multichannel (see"Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center" ). However, it is often the only platform available to provide a unified management queue among all the customer communications channels. Organizations looking to ensure a consistent approach to managing customer contact need to ensure tight integration between the communications channels and the sources of data and customer information critical to providing a good customer experience.

Workforce Engagement

This encompasses the recording, evaluating and scheduling of employees engaged in creating customer service experiences.

Workforce engagement solutions contain complementary functions designed to improve the performance of CECs by means of optimized deployment of appropriately trained and motivated agents. These functions range from recruitment and scheduling to evaluation and training. By adding intelligence (such as speech analytics) to each workforce engagement function, everything from recruitment to scheduling to training can be optimized.

Single Server Deployment

This is the provision of all contact center services as a single server deployment.

For smaller contact center deployments, typically sub-150 seats, it is useful for organizations to deploy single server or single virtual server configurations for ease of management and cost. This critical capability is a trade-off between the number of functions that may be deployed in single-server variant and the scalability of the deployed applications. While some single-server instances may scale beyond 500 seats, this requirement is aligned more closely with the need to support the multichannel compact suite use case.

Use Cases

Based on our market research and inquiry with clients, we have devised three use cases that we believe appropriately reflect most of the decisions organizations need to make when looking at CCI.

Multichannel Compact Suite

These CCI platforms provide core functions in a single suite of software, or as modules for core appliance server architectures.

Multichannel compact suites tend to be deployed for more specific customer service requirements — to introduce new communications channels, or to set up a support function for a new product or service. In most cases, organizations will already have contact center technologies deployed; however, the suite often scales to a lower size of deployment and becomes more cost-effective. The ability to administer and manage contacts across multiple channels is a major benefit to a smaller business in which administration is not a full-time function.

Suite solutions tend not to scale as large as dedicated best-of-breed platforms; however, they are more complete in interoperability among the different components, such as single scripting application for managing contact flows, common reporting schema and administration across all contact channels.

Although some vendors have scaled their suite solutions to meet the needs of more than 1,000 concurrent seats, the "sweet spot" for the compact suite is in the sub-500-seat opportunities.

High-Volume Call Center

Where there are high call volumes to manage, organizations need platforms that can scale, support high resilience levels and deliver best-of-breed experiences.

In this scenario, organizations are likely to separate their call-center infrastructures from other communications channels, so as not to disrupt the high-performing, finely tuned, telephone-based setup. As with compact suites, these same organizations are still engaging in multichannel operation, only as a separate operation to their call centers.

High-volume call centers can typically scale to more than 1,000 agents per platform, with the ability to network to provide holistic service to more than 5,000 seats.

Customer Engagement Center

The CEC refers to a logical set of business applications and technologies that are engineered to provide CSS, regardless of the interaction channel.

The goal of the CEC is not only to provide reactive service to customers as they move among communications channels (including social media) while retaining the customers' context, but also to apply the appropriate business rule to determine the next-best action, information or process with which to engage the customers.

When the contact center is a core component of a CEC, the infrastructure must support strong integration with business application platforms to deliver on business rules, maintain customer context and become an integral part of the customer interaction cycle. It's feasible, but not essential, that the CCI provides management for social media and other contact channels. The key to making CCI a core component of a CEC is support for open standards. This enables organizations to mix their preferred choice of supplier for contact, while delivering a holistic view of the CEC. In this context, the CCI isn't limited by size or location. It spans both large and small contact center environments.

Vendors Added and Dropped

Added

None

Dropped

ALE, Altitude Software and ShoreTel were dropped because they didn't meet the new revenue criteria for inclusion. Interactive Intelligence was dropped because it was acquired by Genesys. Presence Technology was dropped because it was acquired by Enghouse Interactive.

Inclusion Criteria

CCI vendors have been included in this research based on the following criteria:

• Premises-based contact center with product and service revenue of more than $45 million in 2016.
• Evidence of sales, marketing and operational presence (that is, operating sales offices and actively selling contact center solutions — not just selling solutions in one region for delivery in other regions; and supporting multiple language web presence) in a minimum of three geographical regions including Asia/Pacific, Eastern Europe, Japan, Latin America, Middle East and Africa, North America and/or Western Europe. This may be achieved directly and/or through channel partners.
• Significant market share in the specified geographic markets.
• Sufficient sales and operational presence to support market objectives.
• Demonstrable solutions in a minimum of five of the CCI portfolio areas defined in the Market Definition/Description section of the accompanying Magic Quadrant.
• Ability to generate significant interest by leading client market segments.

Each vendor was required to provide five customer references using multichannel routing (not just voice).

Table 1.   Weighting for Critical Capabilities in Use Cases

Critical Capabilities	Multichannel Compact Suite	High-Volume Call Center	Customer Engagement Center
Architecture	5%	15%	5%
Scalability	0%	25%	5%
High Availability	5%	25%	10%
Management	15%	25%	10%
Open Standards	5%	5%	15%
UCC Integration	5%	0%	10%
Workflow	5%	0%	15%
Multichannel	15%	0%	15%
Workforce Engagement	10%	5%	10%
Single Server Deployment	35%	0%	5%
Total	100%	100%	100%
As of May 2017

Source: Gartner (May 2017)

This methodology requires analysts to identify the critical capabilities for a class of products/services. Each capability is then weighed in terms of its relative importance for specific product/service use cases.

Critical Capabilities Rating

Each of the products/services has been evaluated on the critical capabilities (see Table 1) on a scale of 1 to 5; a score of 1 = Poor (most or all defined requirements are not achieved), while 5 = Outstanding (significantly exceeds requirements).

The following vendors were included in this review:

• Aspect
• Avaya
• Cisco
• Enghouse Interactive
• Genesys
• Huawei
• Mitel
• NEC
• SAP
• Unify
• Vocalcom
• ZTE

Table 2.   Product/Service Rating on Critical Capabilities

Critical Capabilities	Aspect	Avaya	Cisco	Enghouse Interactive	Genesys	Huawei	Mitel	NEC	SAP	Unify	Vocalcom	ZTE
Architecture	4.0	4.0	5.0	2.5	5.0	3.5	3.0	3.0	3.5	3.5	3.5	4.0
Scalability	4.0	3.0	5.0	3.0	5.0	4.0	4.0	3.0	3.5	3.5	3.5	4.0
High Availability	4.0	2.5	5.0	3.5	5.0	4.0	3.0	3.5	4.0	2.0	3.0	4.0
Management	4.0	3.5	4.5	4.0	4.0	3.0	3.5	3.0	3.5	3.0	3.0	3.0
Open Standards	3.0	5.0	4.0	3.5	5.0	4.0	3.5	3.0	4.0	3.5	3.5	3.0
UCC Integration	4.5	3.5	3.5	5.0	4.0	3.0	3.0	3.0	3.0	3.5	3.0	3.0
Workflow	3.5	4.5	4.0	3.0	4.5	3.0	2.5	3.5	4.5	3.5	2.5	2.5
Multichannel	3.5	3.5	4.5	3.0	4.5	3.0	3.5	2.0	4.5	4.0	4.0	3.0
Workforce Engagement	3.5	3.0	2.5	2.0	3.5	3.0	2.5	2.0	2.0	1.5	2.0	3.0
Single Server Deployment	3.5	1.0	1.5	4.0	1.0	3.5	4.0	3.5	3.0	1.0	3.5	1.5
As of May 2017

Source: Gartner (May 2017)

Table 3 shows the product/service scores for each use case. The scores, which are generated by multiplying the use-case weightings by the product/service ratings, summarize how well the critical capabilities are met for each use case.

Table 3.   Product Score in Use Cases

Use Cases	Aspect	Avaya	Cisco	Enghouse Interactive	Genesys	Huawei	Mitel	NEC	SAP	Unify	Vocalcom	ZTE
Multichannel Compact Suite	3.65	2.68	3.20	3.53	3.15	3.30	3.45	2.98	3.40	2.35	3.25	2.55
High-Volume Call Center	3.93	3.25	4.70	3.28	4.68	3.63	3.38	3.08	3.58	2.90	3.18	3.65
Customer Engagement Center	3.68	3.60	4.00	3.35	4.30	3.35	3.18	2.90	3.70	3.05	3.13	3.05
As of May 2017

Source: Gartner (May 2017)

To determine an overall score for each product/service in the use cases, multiply the ratings in Table 2 by the weightings shown in Table 1.

Evidence

Scoring for the 10 critical capabilities given here for the evaluation and selection of CCIs was derived from Gartner's independent research on CCIs in recent years. The quantification for the scoring is supported by research in adjacent markets, including contact center operations, telephony, UCC, data communications and data centers, as well as face-to-face meetings in contact center installations, and feedback from Gartner clients and competitive vendors during inquiries. Each vendor in this research responded in detail to a comprehensive, annual primary-research survey questionnaire administered by experienced analysts. This provides an objective process for considering the vendors' suitability for your business' customer service activities.

Critical Capabilities Methodology

This methodology requires analysts to identify the critical capabilities for a class of products or services. Each capability is then weighted in terms of its relative importance for specific product or service use cases. Next, products/services are rated in terms of how well they achieve each of the critical capabilities. A score that summarizes how well they meet the critical capabilities for each use case is then calculated for each product/service.

"Critical capabilities" are attributes that differentiate products/services in a class in terms of their quality and performance. Gartner recommends that users consider the set of critical capabilities as some of the most important criteria for acquisition decisions.

In defining the product/service category for evaluation, the analyst first identifies the leading uses for the products/services in this market. What needs are end-users looking to fulfill, when considering products/services in this market? Use cases should match common client deployment scenarios. These distinct client scenarios define the Use Cases.

The analyst then identifies the critical capabilities. These capabilities are generalized groups of features commonly required by this class of products/services. Each capability is assigned a level of importance in fulfilling that particular need; some sets of features are more important than others, depending on the use case being evaluated.

Each vendor’s product or service is evaluated in terms of how well it delivers each capability, on a five-point scale. These ratings are displayed side-by-side for all vendors, allowing easy comparisons between the different sets of features.

Ratings and summary scores range from 1.0 to 5.0:

1 = Poor: most or all defined requirements not achieved

2 = Fair: some requirements not achieved

3 = Good: meets requirements

4 = Excellent: meets or exceeds some requirements

5 = Outstanding: significantly exceeds requirements

To determine an overall score for each product in the use cases, the product ratings are multiplied by the weightings to come up with the product score in use cases.

The critical capabilities Gartner has selected do not represent all capabilities for any product; therefore, may not represent those most important for a specific use situation or business objective. Clients should use a critical capabilities analysis as one of several sources of input about a product before making a product/service decision.