It’s been an interesting month for industry analytics.
Usually, we spend months waiting for just one market report to appear. However, during November 2020, Gartner rolled out two Magic Quadrants in the space of a week. We saw both the arrival of the UCaaS MQ and the CCaaS MQ essentially one after the other.
While the Magic Quadrant for UCaaS didn’t cause too much of an issue for most brands and consumers in the brands organised across the leader, challenger, visionary and niche player quadrants, the same couldn’t be said for the CCaaS Magic Quadrant.
For the first time, Gartner completely transformed its Contact Centre as a Service report to no longer focus on North America and the Western Europe markets separately. Instead, the two disparate reports have merged together to create a single “comprehensive” report.
But how complete is the Gartner Magic Quadrant, really? How much can we rely on this single view of the communications industry to deliver an accurate insight into the top vendors?
The Problem with the 2020 CCaaS Magic Quadrant
Usually, the Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a service falls into two distinct reports: one for North America and one for Western Europe. This allows for a comprehensive examination of the market vendors spread across the globe. This year, Gartner created a new version of the CCaaS report which looks at North America and Western Europe combined.
Typically, this wouldn’t create too much of a problem – unless you discover that Gartner is placing an uneven amount of focus on one consideration of the report, and not on others. Five9 released a blog soon after the Magic Quadrant was announced for CCaaS, arguing that their position as a “Challenger” was a mistake on Gartner’s part.
Five9 has been a leader in the CCaaS Quadrant for a number of years for the report on North America – and for good reason. The company consistently delivers on all of the main factors that Gartner considers to be valuable in a CCaaS company. Yet, at a glance, it looks as though they’ve been shunted back into a Challenger position for no reason other than a slightly smaller presence in Western Europe.
Does Five9 Deserve to Be in the Challenger Position?
The Magic Quadrant isn’t the only benchmarking report in the world for those searching for Contact Centre as a Service guidance. However, this analysis does carry a lot of weight. It’s one of the most important reports for any business to consider, and Five9’s position as a Challenger is sure to cause some confusion.
For most consumers looking at the Magic Quadrant, it’s going to look like something has gone seriously wrong for Five9 to suddenly drop from the Leader position in 2019, to the Challenger segment in 2020. It seems as though the company’s technology is slipping – when this really isn’t the case. Nothing beyond the lack of presence in Western Europe has changed for the company.
What’s more, it’s fair to say that Five9 could easily serve customers across Western Europe just as well as their clients in North America. The company does have global data centres, after all. Unfortunately, if customers don’t read the Gartner report top to bottom (as most don’t), they’re going to find it a little misleading.
Inconsistencies Between Critical Capabilities and the MQ
Issued alongside the Gartner Magic Quadrant report, we see the Critical Capabilities report – which, like most of Gartner’s analytics solutions, aims to help customers make the right decisions about market-leading vendors. The report features the same analysts responsible for the Magic Quadrant, and this report tells a very different story about Five9.
The Five9 brand is ranked number 1 as an Agile Contact Centre Leader, and number one for North American Product use cases. In fact, in every segment but one of the report, Five9 appears within the top 3 of the most capable companies. It’s number 2 for Customer Engagement centre solutions, and number 3 for high-volume customer call centres. The only place where Five9 doesn’t excel is in the Western Europe Product use case.
This raises some additional questions about the Gartner strategy for reporting. First of all, should we be considering the geographical position of a company when assessing its “critical capabilities” in the first place? Is the location of a company even important from an MQ perspective? Gartner says it combined its two reports based on customer requests, but it’s unlikely for a client in North America to care much about whether their CCaaS provider can compete in Western Europe.
By law of averages, the Critical Capabilities report would place Five9 in the leader segment. Yet, the company loses out entirely based on its Western European position. Elsewhere, Talkdesk didn’t make it into the top 3 for any of the Critical Capabilities in the second report, but it stood out as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant.
Something seems to be amiss here. The point of Gartner reports is to help companies choose the right vendors, yet two reports from the same business are somehow saying entirely different things.
Have Gartner Got it Wrong?
If you look at the Critical Capabilities report and assess the marketplace in general, it seems as though Five9 is clearly still a leader in the CCaaS space. Yet, for some reason, Gartner have placed the company in the top left, instead of the top right, based on nothing but a geographical issue.
It’s also worth asking ourselves how up-to-date Gartner’s Magic Reports really are. When they arrive in the news, we usually see them as cutting-edge evaluations. However, this latest report doesn’t account for various acquisitions that have taken place during the latter months of 2020.
By the time you read this blog, it’s likely that Five9 and other providers are much further on than the numbers submitted to Gartner for the purpose of the report. It is, after all, a sector experiencing exponential growth.
CCaaS is obviously a growing industry that’s changing all the time, and industry leaders like Five9 are growing at an exceptional pace. Business decision makers relying entirely on Gartner to make decisions may be looking at information that’s outdated.
What do you think?
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