Tutorial Narration - Threat of Increasing Competition

Contact centers have various technology options to choose from, and they need to carefully analyze and allocate their limited resources to drive efficiency, reduce costs, and improve experiences. Some contact centers prefer buying different technologies from different vendors, while others prefer bundled solutions from a single vendor. The choice between these options complicates the buying decision and leads to increased indirect competition. Intradiem, which historically had little direct competition, is now facing competition as other vendors offer similar capabilities through cloud-based contact center-as-a-service (CCAS) offerings. These CCAS vendors not only provide customer service journeys but also additional functionalities like workforce management and interaction analytics. This increased competition poses a challenge for Intradiem. The next video will explain the different types of competition in more detail. In summary, competition in the contact center technology market i As you saw in the previous section, there are several technologies available for contact centers. Each contact center must analyze all available technologies carefully to decide how to appropriately allocate their limited resources to balance the need to drive efficiency, reduce costs, and provide better experiences for their agents and customers. Contact centers often choose to use multiple technologies to solve different problems. Some contact centers prefer to buy best-of-breed point solutions, meaning they buy each of their necessary technologies from a different vendor in order to get the market-leading offering of each technology. This often leads to vendor proliferation. Other contact centers prefer to consolidate vendors by buying a bundled all-in-one solution that includes many or all of their necessary technologies from one vendor. Oftentimes, the chosen vendor will be the one that offers a higher-quality product for that contact center's highest-priority technology. The lower-priority technologies included in the bundle might be lower quality or have less functionality. The choice between buying best-of-breed point solutions from multiple vendors and buying a bundled all-in-one solution from one vendor further complicates the contact center's buying decision and leads to increased indirect competition, which will be explained in more detail in the next section. While historically, Intradiem's patents have kept direct competition out of the ecosystem, that is no longer the case. As Intradiem has expanded our use case coverage, direct competition relative to one or many of these use cases has begun to appear in the sales cycle. Key contact center vendors are also beginning to gain traction with their CCAS. Contact center-as-a-service offerings which can introduce more competition. CCAS is a cloud offering that provides the essential capabilities required to manage multi-channel customer interactions, including but not limited to ACD, IVR, and Intelligent Self-Service. Most CCAS vendors go beyond the core capability of delivering channel-agnostic customer service journeys. It is increasingly common for CCAS vendors to also offer workforce management, quality management, interaction analytics, and more. This creates a situation where these vendors may be able to replicate one or more of our use cases, even partially, as they will have access to the data that is needed to execute those use cases. The numerous technologies within the ecosystem, the vendor consolidation trend, our expanded use case coverage, and the rise in success of comprehensive CCAS offerings create increased competition for Intradiem. You will learn about these different types of competition in the next video. The bottom line is, competition is out there and it is also increasing.