The contact centre application market in the APAC region, comprising both on-premises and cloud applications, is expected to grow from US$719.5 million to $966.5 million by 2026, at a CAGR of 4.3%.
This is according to Frost - Sullivan's latest analysis, titled Digitisation and Cloud Migration Transforming Asia-Pacific Contact centre Applications Market, Forecast to 2026. 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 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.
"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," says Frost - Sullivan information - communication technologies research analyst Arpan Bid.
"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, eCommerce, 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.
Market participants have the opportunity to exploit lucrative growth prospects through the ending of lifecycles for existing vendor platforms, adding new channels and providing richer integrations, says Frost - Sullivan in its analysis.
This, in turn, will further drive the APAC contact centre applications market. Here are some additional avenues for growth in the market:
- Organisations that introduce new technologies, such as predictive analytics and machine learning, can enhance capabilities across the board, add value to the company, and ensure that it remains competitive in the price-sensitive market.
- Encouraging contact centres to integrate systems and apps outside the contact centre to support digital transformation strategies.
- Offering rich and easy-to-use contact centre analytics capabilities as enterprises increasingly source end-to-end analytics solutions for their business needs.
- Providing work-from-home (WFH) solutions, AI-enabled bots, robotic process automation (RPA), and automation tools as contact centres are compelled to increasingly invest in advanced tools to manage the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, and to rebuild value following the disruptions of 2020.
