Case Study: 2021 State of the Contact Center Report

Introduction

It’s happened. The time has come for the transformation of the contact center. 2020 was the year that for many organizations, most (if not all) in-office employees were required to work remotely.

While many organizations first saw and solved for this as a temporary situation, all signs now point to the need for a longlasting operate-from-anywhere environment. And contact centers are no exception. For those that were already cloud-based, the move to remote working came with only minor inconvenience. For those that weren’t, the time is now to ensure long-term business survival.

In their most recent Forecast Analysis Contact Center, Worldwide 2021, Gartner estimates that the number of cloud contact center agents will outnumber their premises-based counterparts by the year 2024 (9.2M cloud versus 7.2M onpremises). Compare this to the previous year’s report, published in April 2019. At that time, Gartner’s worldwide forecast showed cloud contact center agents representing just 34% of total agents, as compared to 66% of premises-based agents by the year 2023. So in little more than a year, forecasts for cloud-based contact center agents were dramatically reversed.