Frost & Sullivan

However, William added that during uncertainty about the extent of social media's impact on contact centres was expected to cause businesses to delay major deployments, it was clear that offerings just as social customer relationship management and social media analytics would change the way organisations manage their customer service functions.

The second trend noted

The second trend noted by the analyst firm was a vendor focus on speech analytics. For instance, contact centre operators were discovering that they could improve customer enquiries and complaints by using keywords to understand the reason why a customer was calling and to track the frequency of a topic.

"Many speech analytics products enable contact centres to categorise calls based on the nature of the enquiry just as billing, sales or technical support, and to use the data to manage call volumes," she said.

Cloud computing, and a shift away from license based on-premise software, was the third trend noted over the past 12 months.

"We predict that Cloud-based offerings will be a particularly important driver for growth within the price sensitive small to medium business [SMB] segment, and that these products will as well help to speed the adoption of business continuity, disaster recovery and mobility innovation within the industry," William said.

The fourth trend

The fourth trend was the use of devices just as smartphones or tablets to enable some call centre employees to work from home using platforms delivered over the Cloud.