Contact Center Solutions Market in Latin America and the Caribbean

The CALA Contact Center Solutions Market is in the inflection point of its growth and is poised for significant growth with the growth rate estimated at 21.4% which could see the Market Size growing from USD 1.24 Billion in 2021 to 3.24 Billion in 2026. The Market is driven by factors such as Surging adoption of advanced contact center technologies, Emergence of the Analytical and Cloud technologies, Increasing adoption of SMAC technologies and Rising Implementation of Omnichannel Services

Definition / Scope
Market Overview
Market Risks
Top Market Opportunities
Market Drivers
Market Restraints
Industry Challenges
Technology Trends
Pricing Trends
Regulatory Trends
Post COVID-19 Recovery
Market Size and Forecast
Market Outlook
Technology Roadmap
Competitive Landscape
Competitive Factors
Key Market Players
Strategic Conclusion
References
Further Reading
Appendix

Definition / Scope

A contact center is a centralized office used by a firm to track customer support workers’ performance. It is used to centralize the processing of letters, faxes, and e-mails, as well as to send and receive enormous numbers of requests over the phone. It also aids in comprehending the whole approach to customer relationship management, which is utilized by call centres to evaluate interactions and bridge any gaps, if any, so that right changes may be made.

A traditional call center solution aids firms in managing their outbound and inbound telephony operations. It can be used by managers, agents, and call center supervisors to handle incoming and outgoing calls, manage workforces, measure critical call center metrics, and load automated solutions for all commercial calls.

A cloud contact center solution is an innovative software application that allows businesses to manage client communications (SMS and phone calls) through the internet platform without having to invest in traditional call center telephony settings.

Cloud contact center solution saves money and gives companies better visibility and control over their operations.

Cloud-based solution providers provide a universal virtual number for cloud-based call center systems, allowing clients to contact any of the company’s customer service centres with ease.

It aids in the personalization of business call flow in order to improve the customer experience. A voicemail option and a customized IVR greeting for callers are also added using cloud-based call center software. Calls are routed to the appropriate agents based on the team’s availability and the customer’s feedback using smart call routing call center technologies. The cloud-based call center software market is likely to benefit from rising demand for cloud-based solutions in call centres.

Market Overview

The CALA Contact Center is valued at USD 1.24 Billion in 2021 and is poised to grow at a CAGR of 21.4% to reach a Market Size of USD 3.24 Billion in 2026.

Supply Base: CALA’s supply base is fragmented, with a number of regional and local players.

Market Trend: As the contact center sector in CALA grows, multinational providers are searching for ways to extend their operations by purchasing regional and local companies or opening their own locations.

The contact center service provider industry is extremely fragmented, with the top 10-15 firms accounting for 35–38 percent of market share.

Offshore countries have traditionally been the primary revenue generators for the CALA contact center outsourcing sector. Offshore purchasers are more experienced. However, as CALA buyers get more experienced, domestic sourcing will improve.

The customer service center in terms of implementation, the CALA market is expanding, and service providers in North America are substantially investing in this solution.

Due to strong internet penetration and a growing number of social media users, CALA makes extensive use of social media for customer service.

Because most local CALA contact center agents work from home, the adoption rate is rather high.

When compared to the FTE-based pricing model, service providers in CALA are more accepting of an outcome-based model in terms of customer/buyer maturity. The maturity of service providers leads to a greater use of analytical tools.

Market Risks

Some of the Key Risks for Market Players in the CALA Contact Center Solutions Market are

Concerns about quality are growing, and cost savings are limited.

The buyer’s decision to outsource is frequently influenced by raising quality issues and minimizing the cost difference between outsourcing and managing in-house.

Implications for regulation

Various restrictions, including the Dodd-Frank Act, Basel III, MIFID II, OCC Guidelines, and FRB, limit organizations’ ability to keep personal, financial, and sensitive information within the country’s borders. This limits the number of processes that can be outsourced to other places.

Top Market Opportunities

The Top Opportunities for Market Players in the CALA Contact Center Solutions Market include

Dynamic customer demands for robust self-service interactions

Customers expect live interactions with contact center employees to get answers to their questions, but the rising contact center turnover rate, as well as the time spent waiting and waiting to connect with an agent, create a terrible customer experience. Because customer experience is so crucial in preserving customer connections and enhancing products and services based on consumer input, firms must focus on increasing customer happiness. Organizations can engage with their customers for improved customer experiences by using strong self-service bots and cutting-edge technology like as AI, ML, and analytics, especially after the rush of calls during and after the COVID-19 crisis.

From February to April 2020, IBM saw a 40 percent increase in traffic to Watson Assistant.

Contact center call volumes increased by over 800 percent from usual levels in the second quarter of 2020, according to Pindrop’s 2021 Voice Intelligence and Security Report. In addition, call durations increased by 14% in the fourth quarter of 2020 when compared to pre-COVID-19 levels.

As a result, a number of contact center solution providers have launched self-service AI chatbots and interactive voice response (IVR) systems to automate call handling and reduce call answering and query resolution time in order to meet the increased demand for contact center calls and webchat interactions.

Cloud-based Contact Center

Companies are focused on customer experiences, minimizing churn, and growing revenue, making customer experience one of the most exciting potentials for organizations in the future years. Customer experience allows businesses to engage in-depth conversations with their customers in order to better understand their reactions to certain products and services.

Customer experience improvement is critical for preserving consumer connections and improving products and services based on customer input. Organizations may interact with their customers for better, more efficient, more insightful customer experiences by incorporating cutting-edge technology such as AI, machine learning, and analytics.

Organizations are focusing on developing comprehensive customer experience strategies to win new loyal consumers and maintain existing customers because no business can live without them.

Respondent firms were asked in Econsultancy’s 2020 Digital Marketing Trends Report what the single most exciting opportunity for their organization in the future year was, and the majority of the respondents said it was customer experience.

Market Drivers

The Primary Factors driving the growth of the CALA Contact Center Solutions Market include

Surging adoption of advanced contact center technologies

Organizations infuse their contact centers with robust software-based telephony technologies, such as ACDs, CTI, dialer APIs, and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) softphones, as well as advanced analytics technologies, such as speech analytics and data analytics, and mobile technologies, such as smartphones, mobile screening, and mobile technologies, as both home working agents and office agents manage inbound, outbound, and blended calls, emails, web inquiries, and chats. These technologies help businesses become more responsive by quickly responding to changing client preferences and delivering consistent experiences. While software-based telephony solutions allow contact centers to communicate with customers via their desktops without the use of a hardware-based phone infrastructure, Modern-day contact centers benefit from the use of analytics to monitor and analyze interactions in order to provide customized responses, as well as video enablement to engage in face-to-face video calls. According to the Cisco Contact Center Global Survey 2020, data analytics, bots, and AI robotic automation are considered vital functions of contact centers by over 80% of respondents.

Furthermore, smartphone access gives customers with global accessibility and provides contact center agents with relevant real-time information regardless of their location. This adds to the increased demand for modern contact center solutions that are mobile-enabled, analytics-driven, and data-driven. According to Microsoft’s 2017 State of Global Customer Support Report, 43 percent of young professionals questioned use their mobile phones or tablets to initiate a customer service engagement. According to Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer Report from October 2016, 60 percent of corporate buyers and 43 percent of consumers said it was critical to have in-app mobile support from companies with which they do business.

Emergence of the Analytical and Cloud technologies

Artificial intelligence (AI), predictive analytics, cloud computing, and machine learning are among the technologies that contact centers throughout the world have understood the benefits and possibilities of implementing. As a result, they’ve begun to integrate them into their systems. The adoption of these technologies has created profitable prospects for market vendors to give a consistent consumer experience. With the development in popularity of these technologies, businesses now have access to insights and data that allow them to make better business decisions. AI is rapidly being embraced to construct automated messaging and bots, allowing contact centers to improve their overall operating efficiency.

Big data analytics, on the other hand, has enabled businesses to gain access to both consumer and employee insights and use this information to solve issues such as staff performance and customer experience.

Increasing adoption of SMAC technologies

Customer relationship management contact centers are fast developing from primary models in which operations are delivered in a single channel to multi-channel, multi-function units. Contact centers in the modern era handle inbound and outbound calls, emails, web queries, and chats from all over the world. Organizations utilize robust social media, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud (SMAC) technology in their contact centers to obtain better results. By addressing evolving client preferences and the need for multi-channel consistency, these technologies help enterprises to increase the agility of their business operations. Modern contact centers are focusing on features such as communication as a service, social media capabilities to manage social media questions, smartphone access to supply contact center workers with relevant real-time information, video enablement to engage in face-to-face video chats, and so on.

Advanced analytics to analyze unstructured data in bulk and give crucial insights into consumer behavior, as well as virtual contact centers to decrease costs and complications.

Rising Implementation of Omnichannel Services

Customers can contact with the company via a variety of channels, including emails, social media, SMS, phone calls, video, live chats, and more. It provides tailored customer communication, which improves customer satisfaction. The contact center solution minimizes customer support costs while increasing the number of complaints received. The presence of service providers across all available channel’s aids in the development of client trust. It also gives the agents working with the consumer real-time insights into their customers across all channels. This aids the agent in developing stronger client relationships and improving the customer experience. The contact center software industry is predicted to develop as a result of this.

Market Restraints

The Major Factors Restraining the growth of the CALA Contact Center Solutions Market are

Impact of IVR frauds and cyber-attacks on business operations

Fraud attacks and associated losses are on the rise as more contact centers employ self-service channels, IVRs, and webchats to reduce call volumes at the agents’ end, especially after a spike in the number of calls due to the COVID-19 epidemic. Despite the lack of a payment IVR, several fraudsters have devised algorithms to autodial IVRs, overcome PIN security, and crack the last digits of Social Security Numbers and CVVs of credit and debit cards to undertake account takeovers and withdraw money from people’s bank accounts.

During COVID-19, 66 percent of questioned experts encountered new sorts of frauds in contact centers, with over 57 percent observing the misuse of IVR by criminals for account mining or reconnaissance, according to the 2021 Voice Intelligence and Security Report.

In addition, according to the 2019 State of Call Center Authentication report, 51 percent of banking and financial services respondents see the phone as the greatest threat for account takeover attempts, while 23 percent of non-finance firms see call centers as the primary attack vector.

Additionally, hacks aimed at collecting possible customer information from various online communication channels like the web, social media, and SMS have proliferated. SANS Institute just released a new cloud security report based on a survey of hundreds of firms in the United States, Asia, Europe, and Canada. According to the survey, 19% of respondents have been victims of cloud cyberattacks and are wary about storing data on the cloud.

Contact centers are a valuable source of essential customer information since they deal with customers on a regular basis and handle enormous amounts of data, which makes them attractive targets for cybercriminals. Because of the increasing amount of security threats, contact centers are forced to rely on traditional customer interaction methods. As a result, new contact center approaches or technology are less likely to be adopted. As a result, the number of unattended calls and calls waiting in queue increases, lowering customer satisfaction scores and brand value.

High-Cost Investment to Hinder Market Demand

Companies are confronted with issues as the cost of contact center solutions rises. The on-premises contact center necessitates in-house hardware that must be maintained and serviced on a regular basis. The need for service maintenance and dedicated personnel results in significant company costs. Similarly, in cloud-based software, extended downtime can be extremely costly to the company. Because of the increasing number of cloud threats, firms that enable cloud systems must provide dedicated cybersecurity solutions. During the projection period, this is anticipated to stifle market growth.

Industry Challenges

The Key Factors Challenging the growth of the CALA Contact Center Solutions Market include

Data privacy and security

Because they store such a large amount of sensitive customer data, contact centers are always at danger. The amount of call center fraud attempts grew in 2019, and businesses are responding with advanced solutions to spot suspect calls. According to the 2019 State of Call Center Authentication survey, 54 percent of respondents wished to finish the authentication process before picking up the phone. It is no longer necessary to verify clients over the phone because calls are validated before they are taken up by IVR or call center personnel. Call centers’ running costs rise as calls become longer. Customers are also irritated, which can negatively impact the customer experience and overall satisfaction.

However, with the emergence of intelligent IVRs, also known as IVAs, different degrees of security have been implemented to authenticate users. Furthermore, with the ability to select privacy-compliant and dependable contact center solution providers, privacy and security concerns are projected to diminish in the next years.

Integration of mobility with the existing capabilities

Customers have increasingly reliant on their mobile phones for all forms of interactions in today’s environment. With the growing popularity of smartphones and mobile apps, more customers are requesting customer care via these channels. Businesses must be ready to handle this vital and expanding mode of communication, ensuring that customers may reach them whenever, wherever, and in whatever way they like. According to the 2019 NICE inContact Customer Experience (CX) Transformation Benchmark survey, 66 percent of organizations intend to invest in mobile app experience, citing the need for businesses to optimize mobile apps and mobile-friendly websites for quick responses to common customer questions and issues.

Contact center solution suppliers are aware of the situation and are working to give clients with mobility using existing capabilities. They facilitate real-time cooperation by allowing agents to speak with one another via instant messaging and built-in chat features.

Technology Trends

AI is here to stay

To streamline internal procedures, call centers can use a variety of autonomous and semi-autonomous AI capabilities. Offering call center agents AI-enhanced processes does more than make their jobs easier; it also improves the user experience by improving reasoning speed and accuracy. According to Accenture, artificial intelligence will boost company productivity by more than 35% in the United States by 2040.

Chatbots will continue to grow in prevalence

Customer service provided by chatbots is here to stay, and this year will see its progress and extension. For 43 percent of online customers in the United States last year, chatbots were the preferred communication method for making online purchases. This is true for both e-commerce sites and business pages on social media.

Omnichannel analytics will be used to unify and improve CX

Advanced analytics systems are being used by more omnichannel call centers to create dashboards with facts that affect their operations. This type of data dashboard display on user interfaces is becoming increasingly popular, allowing call agents and supervisors to acquire real-time updates on client experiences.

Pricing Trends

The Pricing of the Contact Center Solutions depend on the following factors

FTE / Hour-Based
Transaction Based
Performance Based

Regulatory Trends

A Major advantage of the region is the existence of flexible and advantageous labor rules for this sort of business. Labor standards are fairly simple in countries like Mexico and India and you can operate a call center for 24 hours [a day]. That is unthinkable in developed countries, where labor unions have greater power. Governments are also interested in creating aid programme for this type of organization – [IT, communications, software developers, and so on.]

Post COVID-19 Recovery

The emergence of covid-19 prompted a surge in the demand for businesses to develop a more agile approach to customer engagement, boosting the worldwide contact center software industry.
Furthermore, the majority of businesses who formerly relied on on-premise systems have relocated their contact centers to the cloud. This has also been beneficial for the market, since it has thrust the adoption of cloud-based contact center at full sway.
To provide call center services to organizations and clients, contact centers are implementing the work from home business module. During the shutdown time, businesses moved their business processes to the cloud in order to give employees with access to the availability of software tools for voice support.
Due to the lockdown, many organizations are now operating on internet platforms; firms are implementing cloud-based call center software to safeguard the online platform for their client database. During COVID-19, demand for cloud-based call center software solutions increased, and this trend is expected to continue during the forecast period.
The new 2027 forecast is expected to be greater than pre-COVID-19 projections. The COVID-19 epidemic has had little impact on the contact center software market’s growth, as adoption has increased despite unusual circumstances. Enterprises are increasingly in need of breaking free from outdated infrastructure in order to establish a more agile approach to customer engagement. Customer engagement success, on the other hand, has traditionally been defined by the precision and speed with which requests are addressed. Furthermore, the ongoing trend of working from home (WFH) during the pandemic drives the usage of contact center software to ensure business continuity and efficiency.
VOO, a large Belgian telco, for example, switched its 188 agents to remote work in one week in April 2020 and developed an agile cloud contact center solution. As a result, absenteeism has decreased from 62% to 5%, and daily contacts per team have increased from 1300 to 1800, a 38 percent increase in productivity.

Market Size and Forecast

The CALA Contact Center Solutions Market is valued at USD 1.24 Billion in 2021 and is poised to grow at a CAGR of 21.4% to reach a Market Size of USD 3.24 Billion in 2026.

In 2020, the Latin America Cloud-Based Contact Center Market is expected to be worth $797 million USD. Over the projection period, the market is estimated to develop at a CAGR of 22.7 percent, reaching a valuation of 2.1 billion USD in 2026.

In 2021, Brazil held the greatest share of the Latin American Country-based Cloud Contact Center market, and it will continue to do so until 2026. In the Latin American market, the Argentina market is predicted to grow at a CAGR of 28.8% from 2021 to 2026.

The Services segment is expected to grow at a higher CAGR during the forecast period

Services are an integral element of the deployment life cycle of any solution. As a result, a variety of vendors provide services related to contact center solutions in order to assist businesses in properly implementing their contact center plans. Consulting, implementation, and integration, as well as training, support, and maintenance, are all included in contact center services. These services are required at many phases, from pre-sales requirement assessment to post-sales product deployment and execution, allowing clients to obtain the most possible return on investment. Contact center solution providers utilize these services to advise end-users and assist them in integrating and deploying software that is tailored to their needs.

BFSI industry vertical to hold the highest market share in 2022

The BFSI industry has a high priority for attracting people, gaining holistic visibility into complete contact center processes, improving prompt replies to customer complaints and enquiries in accordance with country-wide legislation, and protecting firms from fraudulent activity. BFSI organizations can use contact center systems to track, manage, and help remote agents who are selling and earning incentives for insurance and banking goods like credit cards and loans. Contact center solutions have long been used in the BFSI business to save costs, adapt to changing rules, and maximize prospects for financial growth.

Brazil to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period

Because of the increased usage of modern technologies such as cloud and AI- and NLP-enabled bots, Brazil is projected to see significant growth in the next years. According to the Genesys 2018 SMB Customer Service Trend Report, 78.5 percent of Brazil SMEs have used AI in their engagement channels, and 61.1 percent of Brazil SMEs are considering TCO when sourcing new technologies to improve their customer engagement roadmap. As a result, many global cloud-based contact center companies are incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into their contact center solutions and launching solutions in Brazil to assist contact centers in increasing sales, improving customer experience and engagement, and attracting new customers through automated workflows and speech analytics capabilities.

Market Outlook

The CALA Contact Center Solutions Market is valued at USD 1.24 Billion in 2021 and is poised to grow at a CAGR of 21.4% to reach a Market Size of USD 3.24 Billion in 2026.

The year 2020 was a watershed moment for the entire planet, as well as the CX and CC scene. The COVID-19 pandemic has compelled every contact center in the region to adopt the work-at-home-agent (WAHA) model, requiring staff to relocate from their offices to their homes (65.3 percent of the outsourced agents in CALA were working remotely by the end of May 2020). Due to the New Normal’s challenges, CC application vendors and service providers had to quickly respond to the industry’s remote working needs, offering free or trial offers for remote agents, positioning aggressive pricing models, and accelerating the migration to Cloud or Hybrid deployment options in a remarkably short period of time.

In 2021, the CALA CC Alternatives market will continue to migrate away from on-premise systems, which still account for the great majority of contact centers established today, and toward cloud solutions. Even though most updates and improvements are increasingly produced and delivered from the cloud, software upgrades and refresh cycles account for a large share of on-premises revenue increases. Leading suppliers are explicitly outlining migration strategies and positioning choices to connect cloud-based apps with On-Premise solutions in this context, in order to ease the transition for existing premise-based customers and those who do not want to go “all in” on the cloud (hybrid approach).

Technology Roadmap

The growing trend of contact center solutions moving to the cloud has benefited customers by improving customer experience, increasing staff productivity, and allowing businesses to be more flexible. The ability to quickly roll out new services, scale up or down to meet business demands, and deploy agents all over the world (rather than simply in a contact center) has enhanced the potential for both company and customer gain. The proliferation of new channels and mobile-connected customers has necessitated omnichannel engagement, which is defined by seamless transitions between touchpoints and contextual information that informs each contact. The contact center’s future in the cloud necessitates acknowledging that even more advancements are on the road.

Competitive Landscape

The contact center software market is incredibly fragmented. Partnerships, product innovation, strategic joint ventures, research and development activities, mergers and acquisitions, and regional growth are among the techniques used by prominent firms to consolidate their position in the industry. Players are concentrating on providing both on-premise and cloud-based solutions to large and small businesses. These tools are intended to help businesses manage a huge volume of client inquiries more effectively.

Recent Developments

8×8, a leading provider of integrated cloud communications platforms, today announced enhanced cloud connectivity and reliability capabilities in Canada, ensuring greater business resilience and data sovereignty compliance. Using 8)(8 XCaaSTM (eXperience Communications as a ServiceTM), which comprises a fully integrated cloud contact center, phone, video meetings, team chat, and CPaaS APIs and embeddable apps.

Avaya announced a new partnership with Infoline, Omantel ICT’s business process outsourcing leader, in October, in which Infoline will deploy Avaya OneCloudTM Contact Center as a Service to improve customer experience in CALA.

Aspect Software and Noble Systems merged to form Alvaria, a contact center and workforce optimization (WFO) provider, in May 2021. The new Alvaira, according to officials from the two organizations, will rethink the contact center and workforce optimization histories of these two companies, producing optimal customer experience and workforce engagement (WEM) software and cloud services technology solutions. The deal was led by Abry Partners, a Boston-based private equity group, which now owns a majority share in Alvaria.

Competitive Factors

The market for Contact Center Software is fiercely competitive, with several main vendors. Many businesses are expanding their market share by investing in new or enhanced products or pursuing strategic mergers and acquisitions.

Vendors are concentrating their efforts on designing and deploying contact center software solutions for businesses looking to optimize their customer service operations. To properly address customer queries, businesses are working with solution providers. For example, in February 2020, 8X8, Inc. teamed with Dermalogica, a skincare company based in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Dermalogica will replace its ageing telephony system with 8X8, Inc.’s 8X8 X Series cloud communications and contact center platform as part of the partnership, which will transform the way its employees communicate with clients and, as a result, improve its customer service experience. The following are some of the major participants in the contact center software market:

Key Market Players

Key Players Operating in the CALA Contact Center Solutions Market

Cisco Systems, Inc.

Cisco Systems, Inc. is a global provider of networking solutions based on the Internet Protocol (IP). Routing and switching solutions, IP telephony, optical networking, security, storage, and networking and wireless technology are all available from the company. Cisco Systems, Inc. offers a comprehensive variety of networking and enterprise voice and video communication solutions, as well as technical support and other sophisticated services. Next-generation firewalls, advanced malware protection, access points, optical networking, data center switches and security, virtual networking, and storage networking are among the services offered by the company.

8×8, Inc.

8×8, Inc. is a leading global telecommunications firm that develops and markets web-based conferencing, UC, Internet Protocol, video apps, and telephony services. It also provides cloud-based computing solutions and services for an 8×8 virtual contact center. A comprehensive UC SaaS suite and speedy cloud provisioning are among the primary features of the company’s unified solution. Cloud contact centers, corporate phones, and virtual office apps are among the services provided by 8×8, Inc.

Other key players operating in the CALA contact center solutions market include Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc., Oracle Corporation, Five9, Inc., Vonage Holdings Corp., Ameyo, and AVOXI, Inc.

Strategic Conclusion

The CALA Contact Center Solutions Market is at an inflection point of growth and is poised for significant growth with several driving forces such as the explosive growth in the e-commerce segment and the advanced of technology with the emergence of omnichannel services.

Although growth bottlenecks exist in the form of IVR frauds and cyber-attacks and the need for High-Cost Investment which is diminished by the growth opportunities presented for market players such as Dynamic customer demands for robust self-service interactions and Cloud-based Contact Center.

References

Appendix

CALA – Caribbean & Latin America
FTE – Full-Time Employee
APIs – Application Programming Interfaces
VoIP – Voice over Internet Protocol
SMAC – social media, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud
IVR – Interactive Voice Response
CVV – Card Verification Value
CX – Customer Experience
AI – Artificial Intelligence