This market examines the global market for customer service and support applications that enable customer service and support agents to engage customers through their preferred communication channel. It covers a wide range of customer service applications for organizations with customer engagement centers (CECs), ranging from very small (fewer than 20 agents) through average size (50 agents) to very large, and distributed centers (over 10,000 agents). At the heart of a CEC is the need for a CRM application with the customer record (typically including account, contact information, purchase history, service history, and open marketing offers). Its core system function is case management, which can sometimes be referred to as incident management, trouble ticketing or problem resolution. It requires a strong ability to create, split, federate, join, assign and escalate cases, often in a collaborative environment.
Gartner defines sales force automation (SFA) as systems that support the automation of sales activities, processes and administrative responsibilities for organizations' sales professionals. Gartner considers SFA to be foundational technology, implemented to automate an organization's core sales processes. The core functionalities of the SFA market include: • Account, contact and opportunity management • Sales activity management • Sales forecasting • Mobile applications • Reporting • Partner relationship management (PRM) • Platform capabilities