Is Your Business Ready for Contact Centre 2.0? A Proven Blueprint for Modern Customer Engagement

Customer sales and service drive revenue growth across all sectors, making the contact centre a pivotal engine for success.

According to Global Industry Analysts, the contact‑centre market is set to hit $407.1 billion (≈ €349.6 billion) by 2022—a clear sign of its rapid global expansion, says John Finch, AVP Product Marketing at RingCentral.

Yet, many legacy contact centres still rely on 1960s‑era management practices that fail to meet today’s digital‑native, device‑agnostic expectations. Surveys reveal that modern consumers insist on seamless, instant, real‑time interactions across any channel.

These trends are highlighted in Brian Solis’s “Contact Center 2.0: The Rise of Collaborative Contact Centers,” a landmark report by Altimeter Group that calls for a radical overhaul of the traditional model.

Drawing on a global survey of 500 knowledge workers in the US and UK, Solis documents a shift from siloed, on‑premises setups to a cloud‑driven, collaborative platform that unites business experts, agents, and customers in real time.

Contact Centre 2.0 delivers this collaboration by connecting experts with agents and customers instantly, powered by cloud technology that supports phone, web, and mobile channels with heightened personalization, immediacy, and convenience.

The research shows that only 11 % of forward‑thinking companies have already made the full transition, 86 % plan to complete it within three years, and another 11 % target a three‑to‑five‑year timeline.

A key pillar of Contact Centre 2.0 is abandoning legacy premise‑based platforms. While many firms recognize that on‑premises systems are fragmented, non‑omnichannel, and lack real‑time capabilities, nearly 62 % still depend on some form of on‑premises technology for customer engagement.

Cloud adoption is now central to the strategy: 61 % of organisations have fully, partially, or are planning a full migration to the cloud. In fact, 70 % of companies involved in contact‑centre solutions have an official transformation strategy, with digital technology integration and customer experience (CX) both cited as the top initiatives at 71 % each.

Pioneers such as RingCentral are spearheading this evolution, enabling agents and supervisors to collaborate across teams in real time to resolve issues swiftly. The solution stack often includes AI‑driven bots that alert key stakeholders, ensuring immediate action when customers need it.

The author of this blog is John Finch, AVP Product Marketing, RingCentral.