There are many niche vendors that are providing solutions for Web customer service (WCS) channels. Looking at the buying trend of the past 12 months, Gartner has once again observed that more than 80% of multichannel product buyers preferred a more comprehensive WCS suite, as opposed to a stand-alone single-channel or point-based product that requires extensive cross-channel integration each time a new channel is added. Through 2013, four major trends will dominate multichannel customer service strategies:

• Tying together service interaction channels

• Integrating social CRM capabilities

• Analyzing the customer experience

• Applying business rules and knowledge in real time

The advances in WCS functionality have also created a growing landscape of possible vendors from which to select solutions, with one new vendor appearing this year and one vendor falling off the WCS Magic Quadrant for 2010. It is important to consider the customer service contact center (see Note 1) when looking for WCS solutions, due to the tight integration and interaction between these areas. The focus in 2010 has also been sharpened with this Magic Quadrant, replacing the e-service Magic Quadrant of 2009 and introducing considerations such as multichannel analytics, multichannel feedback management and multichannel recording. The focus on having information about more than one WCS channel and recording all the channels is necessary as organizations add complexity to the traditional voice-only contact center. This Magic Quadrant is based on the WCS framework and includes the following components:

• Knowledge base for self-service

• E-mail response management

• Web chat

• Collaborative browsing

• Virtual assistants

• Short Message Service (SMS) and multimodal communication

• Multichannel interaction recording

The strategy and business case for WCS deployments are mostly based on the following business drivers:

• The avoidance of high costs associated with traditional channels

• Procuring a suite solution today that will also cater to future requirements, as opposed to procuring many point-based solutions

• Increasing governance associated with recording interactions across all the customer channels

• The need for a consistent customer experience across all channels and a "one correct answer" scenario

• Engaging with a completely new customer through new channels that typically did not enjoy interactions over the mostly phone-based channels of the past

During the past 12 months, we have seen several acquisitions in the WCS vendor environment, with the most notable being:

• ATG, which bought InstantService

• Accel-KKR, which bought Kana in a private equity take-over

• Attensity, which bought Living-e

Gartner estimates that the above acquisitions are only the beginning of a strong market consolidation for WCS offerings.

RightNow, the leader in the 2009 e-service Magic Quadrant, is still in the lead in its ability to execute, but has lost ground to its closest rival eGain, based on the increased importance of functional components in the new WCS framework. Genesys, which first appeared in 2009, has also made its way into the Leaders quadrant, due to its huge efforts in driving WCS revenue from a mostly untapped, but locked-in, customer base.

Each industry and each business or organization has its own unique customer service processes and service channels, making it unlikely that a single WCS vendor will dominate any given industry. Organizations must, therefore, be selective in choosing a WCS vendor, because the biggest investment is often in the building out of the knowledge base for self-service. This knowledge base is reused across multiple WCS channels, and is extremely difficult to port among different vendors' products.

The positions and commentary in this research are based substantially on three sources:

• Customer perceptions of each vendor's strengths and challenges, derived from WCS-related client inquiries with Gartner

• Reference calls made to vendors' clients

• A vendor-completed questionnaire and briefing about each vendor's WCS strategy and operations

Like all Gartner Magic Quadrants, the Magic Quadrant for Web Customer Service (see Figure 1) is not meant to be used as the sole tool for creating a vendor shortlist. Use it as part of your due diligence, in conjunction with consultations with Gartner analysts.

The WCS suite market is maturing very well, but many of the providers still have fairly big functional gaps in their offerings. Marketing messages are becoming more focused, and creative licensing options are the order of the day and have been highlighted for each of the 2010 participants. Most of the product offerings have a good, solid foundation in e-mail response management and Web chat. The knowledge base for self-service is the most important component of the WCS stack, and the niche players and visionaries typically do not have a strong offering in this space. Because the delivery of "one right answer" is extremely critical in WCS channels, the vendors that fill some channels through partners and external integration often struggle in this area and will unlikely progress much past their existing position if this gap cannot be plugged with an OEM solution that is well-integrated into all the other service channels.

Business leaders continue to see signs of renewed growth, while having to view discretionary investments cautiously. Vendors in this space must have convincing business cases and metrics to demonstrate that their products will have a measurable impact on one or more key performance metrics in the customer experience. The argument for increased investments is being bolstered by the demands to support Web-based customers. Customers expect to find their own answers and solve their own problems, and when they cannot, they want the opinions of their peers in forums and communities. Virtual assistants and SMS and multimodal communication are not yet in mainstream adoption, but are appearing on a large number of organizational road maps. What is notable this year is the impact that contact center infrastructure vendors are having on the WCS applications space.

The WCS Magic Quadrant is based on the WCS framework and consists of seven primary building blocks:

• Knowledge base for self-service — Web-based self-service supported by a knowledge management engine and database through which to perform advanced content delivery. The key focus is to achieve at least an 85% relevance of response. (see Note 2).

• E-mail response management — E-mail management environment with optical character recognition (OCR), e-mail routing, virtual e-mail agents, automated e-mail categorization and escalation, keyword spotting and text emotion detection.

• Web chat — Online Web text-based interaction with a live agent or speech-based interaction with a virtual assistant. The Web chat sessions are routed in a similar manner to voice calls, and a group of text chat agents will engage with the client when receiving an incoming Web chat request.

• Collaborative browsing — Simultaneous browsing of a website to assist with shopping cart or forms completion. Often referred to as "assisted forms completion," this activity will allow an agent to respond to a customer request for online assistance or click-for-help request.

• Virtual assistant — Interaction with a virtual entity (humanoid) via a Web-based or mobile device interface. Interaction types are text-to-text, text-to-speech, speech-to-text and speech-to-speech.

• Mobile customer service with SMS — Service notification and requesting via mobile device or smartphone using data and an SMS channel, and the embedding of a URL into an SMS text.

• Multichannel interaction recording — Recording of the Web searches, e-mail chain, Web chat transcripts, collaborative browse session or SMS interactions for quality purposes.

In addition to the primary components, there are two further components that are important for managing the Web customer experience:

• Multichannel analytics — The use of business intelligence and analytical tools to obtain comprehensive insight into the usage of and customer interaction across all the channels deployed.

• Multichannel feedback management — Using survey tools to obtain customer feedback across all the above channels following interaction within a WCS channel.

The knowledge base for self-service building blocks is often enhanced with natural-language and advanced search, and the strength of this solution would depend on the functional richness of these components. The virtual assistant building block depends on speech-based applications in situations where voice processing is enabled.

Market Traction and Momentum

• The vendor can provide seven new customer references that have gone into production during the past four rolling quarters with the WCS suite functionality, as defined in the market definition. In addition, the vendor has customers worldwide, and sells and supports multiple industries.

• The vendor has generated at least $5 million in business application new-customer revenue for WCS in the past four rolling quarters — of which 75%, typically, is from large enterprises.

• The vendor must have a minimum of five of the seven components identified as the building blocks of the WCS framework as OEM products and as part of the vendor's integrated solution. Two of the other components can be partnered or tightly coupled.

• The vendor must have its own sales team or could use a partner sales team. Deal management, pricing and negotiation must be done centrally, and the vendor must provide presales support to system integrators (SIs) and partners.

Short-Term Viability

• The vendor has at least enough cash to fund one year of operations, given current burn rates.

• The vendor has sufficient professional services to fulfill customer demands during the next 12 months.

• This Magic Quadrant focuses on the WCS suite framework and the players in the market. It does not focus on the stand-alone or best-of-breed solutions in any of the seven framework areas.

Eptica

IntelliResponse has been removed from the 2010 Magic Quadrant, because it no longer meets the qualifying criteria associated with WCS.

Product/Service Functionality: A robust WCS suite is a combination of several subsystems. The implication is that a key evaluation criterion is the existence of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The SOA, based on Web service standards, will simplify integration with other applications. The WCS application should have out-of-the-box, self-service functionality, which means a strong set of industry- and process-specific business logic and data. Through process design or functional breadth, the system must support end-to-end, Web-based customer service processes. Published application programming interfaces (APIs) are critical to connect (or expose) an application's customer service functionality with that of another system or process. Vendors are assessed on the ability of their current product releases to support customer service, as well as their technical support of multichannel and cross-channel environments. The vendor rating is developed by weighing specific functionality: knowledge base self-service (30%), e-mail response management (12%), interaction recording (12%), Web chat (12%), virtual assistant (12%), collaborative browsing (10%) and multimodal services (12%). The vendor must have a stable product development team for all the products it sells. Partnerships were not included in this evaluation; only OEM solutions were included.

Overall Viability/Financial Viability: The ability of the vendor to ensure continued vitality of a product, including a strong product development team to support current and future releases, as well as a clear road map regarding the direction that the product will take until 2013. The vendor must have the cash on hand and consistent revenue growth during four quarters to fund current and future employee burn rates and to generate profits. The vendor is also measured on its ability to generate business results in the WCS market.

Sales Execution/Pricing: The ability of the vendor to provide global sales and distribution coverage that aligns with marketing messages. It must also have specific experience selling its WCS to the appropriate buying center. The strength of the management team is key as well. In addition, the ability of the vendor to offer consistent and comprehensible pricing models and structures, including contingencies such as failure to perform as contracted, or mergers and acquisitions, is important. The vendor is measured on its flexibility to support multiple pricing scenarios, such as on-premises licensing (40%), as well as application on-demand offerings, such as software as a service (SaaS; 60%).

Market Responsiveness and Track Record: The ability to perceive evolving customer requirements and articulate that insight back to the market, as well as create products for readiness as demand comes online.

Marketing Execution: The ability of the vendor to consistently generate market demand and awareness of its WCS solution through marketing programs and press visibility. In WCS, the marketing execution ought to be less critical than some other factors; however, the business reality is that marketing success can fuel future growth and improvements.

Customer Experience: The vendor must produce a sufficient number of quality clients and references with varying levels of sophistication to prove the viability of its product in the marketplace. References are used as part of the evaluation criteria for the vendor's ability to execute and create a vision for how customers can improve customer service. Included in this are implementations (40%) and support (60%). The vendor must be able to provide internal professional-service resources, or partner with SIs with vertical-industry expertise, WCS domain knowledge, global and localized country coverage, and a broad skill set (such as project management or system configuration) to support a complete project life cycle. The critical point on customer experience is to ascertain the degree of change management that accompanied the implementation. Often, the end user experiences discomfort not from the new software, but from the change processes that were introduced with the new system.

Operations: This involves the vendor's ability to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure, such as skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles, which enables the vendor to operate effectively and efficiently. This includes management experience and track record, and the depth of staff experience, specifically in the WCS market. The most important factor in this category is customer satisfaction throughout the sales and product life cycle. The vendor must have sufficient professional services (in-house or through third-party business consultants and SIs) to meet evolving customer requirements.

Market Understanding: The market for customer service is highly diverse because of the multichannel nature of customer interactions and the wide range of processes that need to be supported. To succeed, a vendor must demonstrate a strategic understanding of current and future WCS opportunities unique to its target market. This may be new application functionality, evolving service models or in-line analytical capabilities for unique customer segments. There is also a requirement to demonstrate process integration across multiple channels (for example, where a customer starts in one channel and finishes in another).

Market Strategy: The vendor can describe its go-to-market strategy as something other than as growing until it is acquired by a larger company. Even with this as the end game, it must be clear how prospects will be protected or even benefit from such a strategy. We look for a well-articulated strategy for revenue growth and sustained profitability. Key elements of the strategy include a sales and distribution plan, internal investment priority and timing, and partner alliances.

Sales Strategy: The vendor delivers products and services in line with the needs and capabilities of the buying centers. For this Magic Quadrant, the product must be appropriate for large and midsize businesses. This includes pre- and post-product support, value for pricing, and clear explanations and recommendations for detection events. Building loyalty through credibility with full-time enterprise WCS staff demonstrates the ability to assess the next generation of requirements.

Offering/Product Strategy: Specific vision criteria include business process management (supporting a threaded service task across functional areas, regardless of channel) and providing for the creation of content about the most likely customer intentions and how to solve them, based on continuously variable business scenarios. "Continuously variable" means that, depending on the business context of the interaction, the steps and decisions in a service procedure may vary. The vendor openly communicates to its customers and Gartner a statement of direction for the next two product releases that keeps pace or surpasses Gartner's vision and our clients' vision of the WCS market. The vendor has a sufficiently broad set of products to ensure the success of the product. Without an advanced SaaS product plan (realizable within 12 months), a vendor cannot be considered visionary.

Business Model: To be a leader through 2013, the vendor will have a SaaS and an on-premises application option. Application modules are tightly integrated and have business process modeling capabilities and advanced workflow. The company has a strategy to appeal to its key vertical industries — that is, it integrates with systems that are unique to an industry, as well as delivers packaged functionality and workflow for an industry (such as those for the telecommunications, automotive and consumer goods industries), and business-to-business as well as business-to-consumer interactions.

Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor has solutions for specific vertical industries.

Innovation: Innovative vendors will begin to incorporate concepts that extend to consumer technologies, virtual assistants and customer service functions embedded in virtual worlds, such as the more than 4.5 million participants on the online site, Second Life. The vendor understands major technology/architecture shifts in the market and communicates a plan to use them, including migration issues it may cause for customers on current releases. The architecture is built to operate in a SaaS delivery model, and the application integrates or includes contact center functionality or application links. We examine how well the vendor articulates its vision to support service-oriented business applications.

Applications must fully support SOA and have aspects of a smart client. They must be designed to collect data to supply a feedback loop for corporate performance management (to be visionary). They will help optimize a predictive customer analytics system. These predictive analytics alert management when service patterns are detected that might signal the need to adjust a business strategy or direction, or indicate that the likelihood of a particular business scenario occurring has changed (for example, customers responding to a notice on defective parts, an accident or financial news). The vendor will be measured on the ability of its architecture to support global rollouts and localized international installations. The vendor must have tools for IT and business users to extend and administer the WCS application.

Geographic Strategy: The vendor understands the needs of the three largest markets — the European Union, North America and the Asia/Pacific region — and knows how to build a strategy to focus on aspects of the overall market, directly or through partners. The company delivers products and services in line with the needs and capabilities of the buying centers. For this Magic Quadrant, the product must be appropriate for large and midsize businesses, and for at least three vertical industries.

Leaders demonstrate market-defining vision and the ability to execute against that vision through products, services, demonstrable sales figures, and solid new references for multiple geographies and vertical industries. Clients report that the vendors deliver a high level of value and return on their commitment. The development team has a clear vision of the implications of business rules, and the impact of WCS on customer service requirements. A characteristic of a leader is that clients look to the vendor for clues as to how to innovate in customer service. The vendor does not necessarily drive a customer toward vendor lock-in, but rather provides openness to an ecosystem. When asked, their clients reply that this product has affected the organization's competitive position in their markets and helped lower costs. Leaders provide functionally diverse and rich WCS suites that can be deployed and supported globally, and have at least five of the seven WCS framework components supported as an OEM solution.

The vendors in the Challengers quadrant demonstrate a high volume of sales in their chosen markets (i.e., more than 30% of new business by percentage comes from more than one industry). They understand their clients' evolving needs, yet may not lead customers into new functional areas with their strong vision and technology leadership. They often have a strong market presence in other application areas, but they have not demonstrated a clear understanding of the WCS market direction, or are not well-positioned to capitalize on emerging channels and might lack depth of full functionality in all the areas of the WCS framework. They may not have strong worldwide presence or deployment partners.

Visionaries are ahead of potential competitors in delivering innovative products and/or delivery models. They anticipate emerging/changing customer service needs and move into the new market space. They have a strong potential to influence the direction of the WCS market, but they struggle to meet the needs of all organizations because of geographic limitations, company size constraints or specific product omissions. Typically, their products and market presence are not yet complete or established enough to challenge the leading vendors.

Niche players offer solid solutions for WCS, and support only some of the overall suite functionality and components. They may offer components of the complete portfolios, but demonstrate weaknesses in one or more important areas. They could also be regional experts, with little ability to extend globally. They are usually not focused on and cannot support large enterprises, but rather extend their services and solutions to small and midsize businesses. They may offer complete portfolios, but focus only on one size of organization or primarily on one regional expert.

The core of the Artificial Solutions WCS platform is the Natural Language Processor Engine (CSO LP) which is Java-based. There is a range of licensing and pricing models, with the standard model being SaaS with pricing based on concurrent users. Customers can also opt for pricing based on traffic volume. Maintenance fees are calculated as a percent of the license cost and included in the SaaS pricing as a default. Additional maintenance is sold as service packages or by hourly charge, and customers can negotiate for a variety of different service-level agreement (SLA)-based offerings.

• Artificial Solution is one of only two WCS providers that can provide a virtual assistant solution for customer assistance directly and through a dialogue, using business rules, to serve relevant content to each user. Whenever needed, the virtual assistant interaction can be transferred to a live support person (agent-based chat, e-mail or call back).

• Artificial Solutions' SMS Agent caters to both incoming and outgoing SMS communications management, with the Mobile Agent solution focusing on delivering channel services via the mobile device.

• The multichannel analytics solution has a transactional and a business-focused offering, with the transactional-focused analytics based on the dialogue logs generated from the various channels, and the business-value-focused analytics being generated from the underlying customer interaction history and transactional data.

• Artificial Solutions almost exclusively focuses on Europe. Its plans to extend operations to the U.S. by 2010 have not delivered any additional capacity for U.S.-based deployments yet, but remain a key focus for the organization.

• Artificial Solutions has no OEM solution for Web chat or collaborative browsing. To this extent, Artificial Solutions is vendor-neutral and can be deployed with all regular Web chat/collaborative browsing solutions. However customers will have to engage in a separate contract, as well as maintenance, for these capabilities

• Due to its primary focus on Europe, Artificial Solutions has a limited capability to sell and provide support in other international venues, and will first have to establish a data center presence in North America before being able to expand into that region.

The ATG licensed products are all based on the Java EE specification, and PHP and MySQL are used as the base for the server software architecture. There are three different licensing models for ATG: (1) Traditional License model, with a license fee for software to be installed in the client's data center, and consumer-facing software being priced by CPU, and agent-facing software being priced per seat; (2) Managed Service Provider model for dedicated outsourced installations that are hosted at a Tier 1 data center has the same requirements as the Traditional License model, plus fees for equipment and services related to hosting and operations; (3) Subscription license model for subscription to the ATG e-Commerce Optimization Services line or ATG's Managed Service solution. In all instances, the maintenance is on an annual basis and is a percentage of licensing fees, ranging from 18% to 25%, based on the type of service levels.

• The ATG knowledge base search engine includes Natural Language Processing (NLP), sentence-based information retrieval, parameterized search, weighted terms, federated search, Boolean search, wildcard, meta-tags and personalized results, making for a customizable knowledge-retrieval process.

• In 2009, ATG stopped development on its e-mail response management system (ERMS) solution. Following the acquisition of InstantService, The company has relaunched the ERMS product with a mail notes feature that has hidden fields to enable agents to add notes to e-mails to assist in the resolution of an incident, with the notes being invisible to the customer and only displayed in the Agent Console.

• The collaborative browse capability includes both Form Sharing to see, in real time, the information that an online customer has entered into form fields, as well as co-navigation, which allows the agent to follow along with a customer as the customer navigates a website.

• ATG does not have an SMS solution, but has plans on its road map to build out this functionality in the future. Release dates are, however, unknown.

• ATG handles text-to-speech interactions via the ATG Form to Phone service, but does not have an offering in the virtual assistant space. The virtual assistant offering is not currently on the company's road map, but it does offer an integrated offering with IntelliResponse's Smart FAQ engine for automated agent-assist for chat and e-mail channels.

• ATG Self-Service, Knowledge, Search and Commerce Service Center are available only in on-premises licensed models or in an outsourced, managed service provider model. There is no SaaS option available for these offerings.

The Avaya Contact Center Suite is a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)/time division multiplexing (TDM)-based solution. These multichannel applications use open standards and can be deployed to multisite, geographically disbursed contact centers. Tools and open Web services allow the integration of business applications and processes into the WCS environment to create ways of serving customers. The majority of Avaya's WCS products are sold on a per-server basis, with licensing required for agents or ports. Software support is priced as a percentage of the full purchase price of the software license and is available in one- through five-year agreements.

Avaya remains in the Niche Players quadrant, but has moved up slightly. However, the lack of a deep functional knowledge management solution that is integrated with the other channels restricts further movement at this stage.

• Avaya supports both .NET and Java EE platforms, making it an excellent option for predisposed organizations. Avaya is also available in 16 different language and currency options.

• The e-mail response management product can compose auto acknowledgements, as well as personalized automated responses, which can be sent to the customer automatically or forwarded to an agent for quality assurance review.

• Interaction recording not only of the voice channel, but also for multichannel interactions, is integrated and stored in an easy-to-use, consolidated repository.

• In addition to normal Web chat, Avaya has voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) chat, which allows an agent to talk to a customer on the phone during a Web chat session, if required. Customers can then use either a telephone handset or Internet connection.

• Existing Avaya clients should consider this solution, but if you are not currently an Avaya client, you will have to deploy the contact center solution first to obtain access to the WCS product set.

• Although Avaya indicates that it can integrate with a virtual assistant solution, there is still no option on its road map to launch a product in this area.

• The knowledge base self-service tools focus extensively on frequently asked questions (FAQs) and has good search facilities, but it is still not yet in the same category as some of the advanced knowledge base self-service tools available in the market.

• No hosted or SaaS offering is available from Avaya. In 2009, we documented that "its strategic plans for the future look promising," but, to date, nothing has been delivered.

The eGain solution set is available in on-premises, hosted and SaaS deployments. The hosted network offers SaaS services from northern California and England. The eGain platform is based only on Java EE, and all business objects, process workflows, knowledge base content, interaction history, and user context is accessible through a Web services API. eGain continues to be the WCS vendor with the most complete offering on the market. Annual maintenance costs for on-premises deployments are typically 12% to 15% of the license fee, and there is no maintenance costs for hosted deployments.

• eGain's core strength lies in its knowledge base, which is enabled with multiple search capabilities like intent-based search, natural language, and keyword search, as well as FAQ and browsable topics and Guided Help.

• eGain is the only WCS provider with its own virtual assistant that enables businesses to offer text and speech chat interactions through the virtual assistant, which supports multiple languages, has emotional and cultural intelligence, and is capable of understanding natural language.

• The eGain Notify product enables proactive and interactive interactions through SMS and mobile devices for assembling, delivering, and storing automatic reminders, alerts, and updates at all stages of the customer life cycle.

• eGain has traditionally had good reporting, but the analytics components required further focus. The recently released eGain 10 has multichannel analytics and is a brand new capability now offering business intelligence and analytic capabilities across multichannel customer interaction. Because it is a fairly new release, we have not managed to get many references on the success of this new functionality.

• eGain's platform is based on 100% pure Java EE, and implements an SOA. There is an API available, but no .NET solution is available or planned for the future.

The Eptica solution is based on a Java EE platform, with the presentation being HTML and having Web access. Both on-premises and SaaS options are available. Both licensing options are charged on a concurrent user basis for number of connected agents, as well as knowledge base usage volume limits that is charged by the number of interactions. Maintenance is paid at 20% of the list price, but with concurrent user pricing, this could be difficult to calculate.

• The Eptica knowledge base is self-learning, and every interaction with the knowledge base fine-tunes the links between questions and answers to further enhance relevance. Content is managed by business users and requires no content tagging or programming of concepts.

• Mobile customer service can be leveraged as an inbound and outbound channel. Enquiries can be received by SMS and processed by agents in another channel. Self-service URLs can also be embedded within SMS text in order to point customers to specific information.

• Eptica provides full track, trace, visibility and multichannel recording of every interaction. Eptica also records all cross-channel interactions within a single customer record to provide a complete view of the customer's interaction history.

• Eptica is the smallest of all the vendors on this Magic Quadrant in revenue and company size, but having grown by 17% in 2009 is financially stable. With a primary focus in Europe, Eptica will be challenged to sell, deploy and support large U.S.-based organizations.

• Eptica does not have a virtual assistant solution, and customers will have to engage a third party to fill this gap. Eptica also does not have any plans on its road map to develop a virtual assistant going forward.

• Eptica is built entirely on the Java EE platform, and there is no .NET option available. Customers with this architecture standard will have to invest in integration efforts to run the Eptica WCS solution.

Genesys still lacks functionality in some areas, with the most notable being the absence of a knowledge management product. Its partnership with InQuira should plug this gap for the near future. Genesys WCS suite components are priced and licensed by the seat. For Genesys Knowledge Management, there is an addition to the seat charge or usage fee in the case of Web Self-Service, as well as an application fee that is specific per project.

• Genesys has shown a dramatic increase in focus since its first appearance on this Magic Quadrant in 2009. If you currently own Genesys for your voice solution, then consider asking about its WCS functionality to expand your multichannel services.

• The Genesys feedback management application can be used to gather customer feedback directly after an interaction completes, irrespective of the interaction channel. The invitation to participate in the survey is provided in the channel that was used for the engagement (i.e., a customer who completes an SMS interaction will see an SMS survey invitation, and a customer completing an e-mail interaction will receive an e-mail invitation).

• Genesys builds on its strong vision for future multichannel self-service, and for extending contact center capabilities into an integrated WCS experience that stretches beyond the contact center.

• The legacy knowledge management solution from Genesys is not very strong; therefore, the vendor has partnered with InQuira to fill this product gap. Genesys does, however, provide Tier 1 support for the InQuira product, and there is no multivendor contract necessary, because you can buy the InQuira solution from Genesys.

• Genesys does not have a virtual assistant solution, but has partnered with Oddcast. Unfortunately, no references were using the Oddcast virtual assistants on top of the InQuira knowledge base in a Genesys environment, so this combination is still unproved.

• Multichannel recording and playback functionality has been as strong as some of the other WCS providers, but Genesys concluded an agreement with Zoom International at the end of January 2010 to provide Internet Protocol (IP) recording and quality management functionality, and is busy extending the product capabilities to capture Web activities, with a targeted release later in 2010.

• Customer references still reported challenges with engaging the correct people for support in the Genesys organization, but Gartner expects that a key initiative on the way in customer management should help service difficulties disappear toward 2011.

Interactive Intelligence comes standard, with out-of-the-box integration with Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino or Novell GroupWise, and supports both .NET and Java EE. The WCS solution can be deployed on-premises, hosted or SaaS. The on-premises-based licensing includes a server fee for every locally installed switch over pair, and a user- or workstation-based perpetual access license. Licenses can be upgraded from a single channel to handle two channels, or to handle three or more channels. The communications-as-a-service (CaaS) licensing provides a monthly agent fee, with an add-on monthly charge for multiple channels. The maintenance fee is 18% of the list price for standard maintenance for on-premises-based software, and CaaS pricing includes all software maintenance.

• The ERMS uses NLP and, combined with e-FAQ, provides auto-suggestions, as well as e-mail routing, which proposes the response while the agent determines whether to send the e-mail out as is or to edit it further. It can also automatically route e-mail to users based on criteria such as keywords and/or phrases, sender's e-mail address or sender's domain.

• The solution supports on-premises and hosted deployments (CaaS), and customers can easily migrate from a CaaS solution to an on-premises solution.

• Web chat sessions can be routed by first-in first-out, or by more-sophisticated rules, such as topic areas selected on the website, assigning skills, priority and cost of agent. Prewritten responses, such as greetings, closings and commonly asked questions, can be dragged and dropped into the chat from the supporting e-FAQ solution.

• Interactive Intelligence's e-FAQ solution can be used as a knowledge base solution; however, it lacks the advanced features one would find with a full self-service knowledge management deployment.

• Interactive Intelligence has partnered with LiveLook for a collaborative browsing solution, since it does not have an OEM option. Organizations will have to sign a separate contract, and support will be provided by LiveLook.

• There is still no virtual assistant solution available from Interactive Intelligence, and no partnership exists in this channel either. The SMS solution requires a custom handler and needs a developer to build the flow, because there is no configurable functionality in this area yet.

Kana's solutions are SOA-architected with Ajax-/JavaScript-based user interfaces (UIs). Following its acquisition by Accel-KKR, all of Kana's products will be available on-premises and on a hosted and SaaS basis. Pricing for on-premises products is CPU- and agent-based, and pricing for the SaaS offerings is subscription-based by seat or usage. Standard maintenance is offered at 15% of the net license fee, and premium maintenance is offered at 20% of the net license fee, with SaaS offerings including maintenance in the usage price.

• Kana's knowledge base search can be driven using the full context of a session; incorporating knowledge of the customer, the case and the customer's environment; and can be filtered by the user through an automated clarifying question process.

• The ERMS capabilities can perform e-mail routing based on e-mail content and have the capacity to OCR e-mail content and keyword spot, and perform text emotion detection to automate the process of capturing, documenting, interpreting, routing and prescribing e-mail-based answers.

• All the WCS channels that Kana provides incorporate business intelligence and analytical tools to gain insight into channel usage, content usage and customer behavior.

• Following the recent acquisition by Accel-KKR, Kana has launched a SaaS solution, but at the time of this publication, could not provide any references that have deployed this solution and have been live for a period of 12 months or longer.

• Despite indicating that virtual assistants and SMS are OEM solutions provided by Kana, Gartner has also not seen any evidence of implementations that have been live for 12 months or longer.

• The strategic corporate direction to focus primarily on large enterprises and on-premises solutions has resulted in the exclusion of small and midsize businesses. This has left a lot of money on the table for the other service providers in the WCS space.

nGenera's CIM suite is built on Microsoft .NET. Designed on a publish-and-subscribe framework, whenever a change is made (either to the UI, agent roles/permissions or content layer), the change is immediately pushed out to nGenera agent clients, without requiring a re-login. nGenera prices the CIM suite for on-premises and hosted/SaaS separately, with the on-premises solution mainly priced on a named or concurrent user basis, and the hosted or SaaS solution priced on a subscription basis of user and time period. Maintenance fees are calculated as a percentage of license cost, with varying levels of maintenance available to customers, each with a related percentage.

• The nGenera Knowledgebase (nGen KB) 9.0, released in March 2010, was a major upgrade to the knowledge base capabilities and has increased integration and functional support across all the WCS channels, and new social knowledge capabilities have been introduced as well.

• The nGenera collaborative browsing functionality with built-in security enables the agents to assist the customers with online transactions in real time with shopping carts, Web forms and complex support issues.

• All products in the nGenera CIM suite are available for on-premises and hosted/SaaS environments, with the features and functionality being identical in both environments.

• nGenera CIM does not provide any virtual assistant capabilities, but the company has partnered with VirtuOz in this area to deliver a solution. Support will not be provided by nGenera, and a separate contractual and licensing agreement will need to be concluded should a customer want to deploy a virtual assistant.

• nGenera does not provide SMS as a channel for customer service. Recording is, therefore, also not provided for SMS interactions.

• nGenera is built entirely on the .NET platform, and there is no Java EE option available. This will create challenges for customers that do not have this as an architecture standard.

Oracle-Siebel remains in the Niche Players quadrant, despite its strong showing on other Magic Quadrants. This is primarily due to a lack of functionality in a number of WCS building blocks, with the most notable being the absence of a knowledge management solution with advanced features to support the WCS channels.

• Oracle-Siebel is a highly visible company in terms of its financial position and global representation, directly and via partnerships. It has a significant Oracle customer database to mine for cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

• Oracle-Siebel has an extensive vertical-industry offering for a variety of industries, ranging from automotive to finance.

• Oracle-Siebel has an extensive system integration partnership around the globe with Accenture, BearingPoint, Capgemini, IBM and others.

• Its extensive analytics capabilities allow detailed knowledge extraction from all the channels that Oracle-Siebel has available.

• Oracle-Siebel does not have a collaborative browsing capability, and there is no virtual assistant in place. Gartner could not confirm vendor plans to provide this functionality anytime in the future, and the complete road map for the vendor's WCS offering is unknown.

• The solution is primarily focused on large organizations, leaving smaller organizations looking elsewhere for a WCS solution.

• The FAQ solution is not functionally rich, so Oracle-Siebel relies on InQuira for its on-premises and on-demand knowledge management for its self-service solution set.

• Except for the InQuira partnership, Oracle-Siebel does not have a SaaS solution available for WCS suite functionality.

The WCS solutions that Presence Technology currently supports are versions 7.0 to 7.1, and 8.0. Presence Custom Report allow customers to create customized reports combining data from the Presence WCS solution and other data sources. The Presence OpenGate product is also a TDM/VoIP gateway developed by Presence Technology. It allows Presence WCS solutions to be deployed stand-alone or integrated with any PBX. Presence Suite module licensing is primarily based on one license per concurrent agent. For recording, it is one license per port, with two different license levels based on the recording activation. Rental, pay-per-use, hosted and SaaS pricing models are based on the same principles. Maintenance fees are calculated as a percent of the license cost and range from 12% to 22%.

• The Presence Messaging module supports the SMS channel and uses Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) modem-based gateways or mobile telecom operators to serve for SMS-to-e-mail or e-mail-to-SMS communication. The WCS solution manages this channel as any other channel, with all interactions being controlled by a universal queue.

• Presence Technology provides on-premises, hosted and SaaS solutions for all the channels supported, making it a flexible option for organizations. It also supports both .NET and Java EE architectures.

• The full solution or just one module can be provided on-premises or hosted/SaaS. Front ends can be installed on-premises (fat client) or can be centrally hosted via Presence Technology's thin-client Web agent.

• Gartner views the knowledge base for self-service as the most important building block for WCS. Unfortunately, Presence Technology does not have an OEM solution available in this area, and relies on third-party products to support this feature. Presence has had good success with SugarCRM's FAQ solution and with KBPublisher.

• The WCS solution can only record the interaction across the currently supported channels (i.e., e-mail, fax, SMS and Web chat), leaving any collaborative browsing or virtual assistant interactions unrecorded.

• Presence does not have any virtual assistant solution, and has partnered with Artificial Solutions to fill this gap.

• Presence Technology has limited ability to provide WCS solutions for global deployments.

The RightNow solution is architected to support multitenant, hosted environments, enabling support of multiple customers on the same database, as well as support for redundancy and failover across hosting centers. It also supports multiple versions of the software to run within the hosting environment, enabling customers to upgrade when it makes the most sense for their businesses. RightNow is the first and only vendor to be a Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) partner, allowing the hosting of the U.S. Department of Defense and other federal agency clients on their own secure pods. RightNow is priced on a subscription model. It is packaged as a suite supporting service, sales, marketing, feedback and analytics, business processes and interactions. Named users are, however, available in stand-alone chat, standard, enterprise or enterprise contact center versions.

• In the past 12 months, RightNow has expanded its sales force and restructured the account management and customer relations process to provide a more customer-focused approach to customer service.

• RightNow has two business intelligence solutions: RightNow Analytics and RightNow Enterprise Analytics. RightNow Analytics delivers real-time operational insights across the solution by referencing the live operational database, which stores all interactions occurring across all channels as they occur. RightNow Enterprise Analytics provides more-advanced managerial analytics using a packaged data mart.

• RightNow's Enterprise Feedback Management solution will enable you to capture customer feedback across all customer touch-points (Web, e-mail, phone, chat) in real time; analyze and measure that feedback, and take action on it.

• RightNow has a good reach and presence in the entire primary market (and some secondary markets), directly or through a network of SIs. It has a good global reach for sales and support, and strong market share worldwide. The brand recognition is growing, and RightNow is growing its installed base aggressively.

• RightNow does not support natural-language search for its knowledge base, but provides intelligent search, which is a keyword search that is complimented by category-based and clustered browse search.

• RightNow does not have a proven and robust OEM solution for virtual assistants, or for the multimodal communications and SMS channel.

• With RightNow not having an OEM solution in the above two channels, the recording of interactions is not unified across all the interaction channels. Customers will have to rely on alternative methods for recording interactions for the virtual assistant and multimodal communications and SMS channels when partner or third-party solutions are used.

• At the end of 2009, RightNow dropped the on-premises solution from its product list. Customers looking for an on-premises solution will have to select another provider.

SAP is focused on providing an open application and integration platform with SAP NetWeaver that is open to both customers and partners to configure and customize. The WCS solution is based on the SAP Java EE platform, which is part of the SAP NetWeaver stack. With the next functional release the WCS architecture, SAP plans to have an intuitive and interactive UI, JavaServer Faces (JSF), as the underlying Web framework, offering Ajax and Flash interactivity, which can be coupled with mashups. SAP prices its solutions on an industry basis, using metrics relevant to the industry. SAP also employs value-based pricing, which is designed to reflect the value that SAP solutions will deliver to customers. The metric used for the WCS component is the number of pages viewed per year.

• SAP Business Communications Management (BCM) is an all-software suite that includes multichannel WCS, inbound and outbound voice, interactive voice response (IVR), call-recording and quality-monitoring capabilities, and strong integration with mobile devices.

• The ERMS has auto acknowledgement, which provides an automatic e-mail to acknowledge the customer's request; auto response, which provides an automatic response based on the content of the requests; and auto prepare, which automatically prepares a replying e-mail based on content parsing, automatic categorization, templates, attachment assignment and standard response texts.

• SAP CRM supports multimodal communication, leveraging the flexibility of the platform to customize for connections, with various SMS gateways to enable service notification, submit new service requests or query for information using any mobile communication devices that are SMS-enabled.

• SAP has strong brand recognition and respect among IT decision makers and influencers. It also has a broad global reach and a growing market share worldwide. SAP's strong viability, resulting from the combination of company size and worldwide market penetration, will provide extensive opportunities for future growth in the fast-growing WCS market.

• SAP's gap in a market-leading knowledge management solution was narrowed following the announcement of an InQuira partnership in May 2010. This will strengthen SAP's offering in this area, but customers will still have to engage in separate contracts and separate support organizations for each respective product.

• SAP does not have any collaborative browsing, or any virtual assistant capability, but this is planned for future releases.

• SAP can only record interactions with customers for Web chat, e-mail and Web access. There is no recording for collaborative browsing or virtual assistant and SMS.

• SAP's WCS solutions are only available in an on-premises deployment model. However, the SaaS deployment model is on the vendor's road map and will be available in the future.