Episode Transcript
[00:00:22] Hi everyone. Welcome and thanks for tuning in to this edition of Metrogy's Metrosite. Hi, I'm Diane Myers. I'm Metrogy's senior research director and principal analyst. Today I'm going to share a few insights from our recently published study, our customer experience Metrocast.
[00:00:38] As a little bit of background, this study looks at various topics, specifically twelve different topics, including contact center as a service, CRM, cpaas, AI development platforms, bots.
[00:00:54] We gathered data on topics including spending plans, vendor decisions, buying criteria. We interviewed or we surveyed just shy of 1600 businesses across, or entities across ten different countries. So this is a global study. It touched on all the way from small businesses all the way up to very large enterprises. So it's a real, you know, end to end in terms of insight and inputs. So today we're going to touch on a few of the topics. So we asked companies for their plans in terms of using the same vendor or the same provider for contact center and unified communication.
[00:01:37] 44% of respondents told us they are currently using the same vendor for their CC and their collaboration. And, you know, and that's kind of in line with what we've been seeing, maybe a little bit down from what we saw a year ago, but in that same range. And the thing that was really interesting is we asked those companies that have that same vendor, what was the value that they had recognized? And that gave us a lot more insight than we'd been getting. And the overall overwhelming answer that the number one across the board was cost savings. 60% of respondents said, yeah, by using the same vendor we are absolutely recognizing cost savings. So that was kind of overwhelming. But other important results that companies had recognized is the ability for agents and other employees to chat, to communicate, to help resolve customer issues in real time, right? So being able to use the same platform, being able to be on a call or chat with a client, and then to be able to tap into subject matter experts within the larger organization was a big value, right. And that's what a lot of our respondents had mentioned.
[00:02:45] It also, some other ones was not as important and not as recognized, but still in the mix was kind of a unified user interface, allowing agents to connect with not, you know, to bring, to draw non contact center employees into a call with a client. So, but the big one was cost savings, right? So if they're moving and they're utilizing one vendor, really the, you know, the value is a cost savings.
[00:03:15] So we had a section around bots, specifically around artificial intelligence bots, AI bots, and we were interested in the adoption and the usage, but we dug a little bit deeper. So today, only 30% of companies are actually utilizing bots today for customer interactions. The highest level of adoption is coming out of Asia Pacific, with 35% of businesses telling us they're using AI bots. And so that's really a great baseline. But we went a little bit deeper. We wanted to understand some of the implementations.
[00:03:50] And so, for those that are using bots today, right, 85% of them are using text. So chatbots, and 55% are using voice bots. So chatbots, absolutely, much more widely adopted, kind of the number one use case or scenario, and then voice. So then we dug a little bit deeper and we said, what are you using those bots for? Particularly the chat bots? But even on the voice side and automated responses was the first one. So 56% of businesses that are using chatbots are using them for automated response.
[00:04:29] A little bit below 50%. We see companies using them for guided, you know, to guide customers through knowledge bases.
[00:04:37] So those were the big two use cases, right. For using the bots was automated response and guiding, you know, guidance through the knowledge bases. Beyond that, we had, you know, contextual screen pops for agents triaging some customer issues and making sure they're routed appropriately. So there's others, right? Definitely. But the big one was the automated response.
[00:05:01] A big part of our metrocast study is to understand spending trends. So, across the eleven areas, 1112 areas that we surveyed, and we asked companies about, we asked them about their spending, and we also then ask them what their plans were for the next couple of years in terms of are they increasing, keeping spending flat, decreasing spending? And we asked this in the different product areas. But today, I'm going to spend a little bit of time specifically around the contact center platforms, because that's the big piece, right? That's the most important piece. And we found that companies that have deployed their own contact center, whether it be sitting on prem or in a dedicated cloud, 45% of companies of those companies are increasing their spending in 2024.
[00:05:51] The main driver of that is increasing maintenance and support costs, right? So after we found out that they were increasing or decreasing, we asked, well, why? Right. What was driving that increase or the decrease and the increase the driving? The drivers for increasing the spending is around maintenance and support issues, right? So that was overwhelming. The biggest driver for increased spending for those customer owned platforms.
[00:06:16] On the flip side, we asked around contact centers of service, right? The full pure cloud service. And only 34% of the study participants who are using ccaas said they plan to increase their spending in 2024. So a little bit less in this current year that we're in in terms of spending increases, but it ramps up, right. We see spending increasing for ccaas growing in 2025 and 2026 based on what the participants told us and the main driver. Right. Of the spending increases for ccaas, from what the companies told us was that they're adding seats. Right. They're adding staff to that CCAaS platform. Right. This is in line with what we're seeing with a lot of larger deployments, which are taking years to implement with contract lengths of two, three plus years, which then the spending goes up as more and more of the agent seats come online with ccas. Right. So the increased spending gets tied to the deployment size as we add more seats over the course of a contract or course of implementation, right? So overwhelming 70% of those businesses who said, yeah, we're increasing our spending, it was because of adding seats, adding staff to that CCAAS platform.
[00:07:31] We dug in to this whole concept of omnichannel, right? And we've been tracking organizations plans to implement multiple customer interaction channels for a number of years. Right. What we in the industry think about in terms of actual omni channel adoption, and in 2020, it stalled, right, in terms of bringing multiple channels together. And we only saw companies telling us that 28% of them were actually truly using integrated customer channels. Today, in this current study that I'm discussing, it's about 34%. Right. So we've gone from 28% in 2020% to 34% by the end of 2023. Right. And then another 30% said they plan to implement by the end of this year. Study participants often overestimate their adoption across many different categories. So we expect the omnichannel usage to come closer to around 45, 46% by the end of 2024. And so what does that consist of? Well, the number one channel, and this is complicated, right. Bringing and integrating channels is not an easy task, and a lot of people think it's, if I have them, I can do it. But the reality is it's a lot more sophisticated and so hence the lower adoption numbers. But the number one channel that companies are using for customer interaction is email, overwhelming, followed by voice phone. Right. You know, people need to still talk to, you know, talk to an agent, talk to a company, and then social media channels and then SMS.
[00:09:12] Well, thanks, everyone, for listening today. If you're interested to learn more about our Metrocast service or metrogy's other research, we'd be really happy to hear from you, please reach out to us via the contact button on the metrogy website at ww dot metrogy.com. And that's all for now. On behalf of the metrogy team, goodbye till next time. Take care, everybody.
