October 20, 2025
IDC Delivers A MarketScape for European CCaaS
The global market is never a level playing field for contact centres. Even the European theatre has many variables and niches that make it a hard landscape to judge for buyers. Enter IDC with the research brand’s first European-focused CCaaS report.
As a background to the report, “MarketScape for European Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)” IDC notes “The European market is transforming, driven by cloud migration, AI adoption, and evolving customer expectations. Europe remains one of the most complex regions to navigate due to its fragmented regulatory landscape, cultural and language diversity, and country-specific buying behaviours.”
IDC Keeping Contact Across Europe
Some interesting nuggets from the report show some striking differences across the key territories, noting that:
- Germany: Competitive pricing is the top factor; deployment flexibility is the biggest challenge; and there is a preference for managed service providers.
- The U.K. Professional services are most valued, with a preference for systems integrators (SIs).
- France: Professional services are key; poor user experience is the main challenge; and there is a preference for pure CCaaS vendors.
- Netherlands: Data residency is the top priority.
And when it comes to AI, adoption is broad with 30% already using AI in contact centres and 80% having adopted it in some form. Beyond AI, many firms are resorting to private clouds to ensure data residency, security and sovereignty.
Among the vendors featured in the report, Five9 is noted as a market leader, noted for a strong European strategy that revolves around addressing the unique needs of the region,
including data sovereignty, multilingual support, and compliance with local regulations.
Other Leaders include Genesys, Nice, 8×8 and Content Guru, with the likes of Sprinklr and Zendesk in the Major Players segment of the report.
The Rise of Agentic AI in CCaaS
With all the interest over agentic, IDC notes that “AI delivers value when solutions are secure, customizable, and integrated into workflows. Beyond efficiency gains, advanced AI can drive self-service, augment agent performance, and enhance the overall agent experience by surfacing insights, automating routine tasks, and reducing effort.”
For Five9, IDC notes that the company’s AI offering uses “AI/automation to enhance agent functions. Five9 supports customer context, real-time suggested response, realtime transcription and translation, and RAG for knowledge discovery. Post-call administrative tasks such as summarization are supported through AI.” Across Europe, companies like Yopa, Doctor Care Anywhere, Puma, and others, have adopted Five9’s technology to support their customer experiences.
Another member of the Leader group, Martin Taylor, Co-Founder and Deputy CEO of Content Guru, comments, “We believe being recognized as a Leader by IDC MarketScape underscores our position at the forefront of Europe’s cloud contact centre market.”
“We further believe this recognition is a testament to our sustained investment in innovation and our commitment to helping enterprises deliver exceptional customer experiences at scale. As AI continues to redefine how organizations engage with their customers, we remain true to our ‘helping humans help humans’ philosophy: empowering businesses with intelligent, future-ready solutions that enhance both customer and agent experiences.” He concluded.
With increasing EU data security legislation, vendors will need to keep on their toes to comply with the rules, while trying to out innovate each other in the AI and high-value contact stakes.
It will be interesting to see if there are any major shifts in the 2026 version of the report, unlikely but AI innovation could see some shifts. And if the likes of Gartner feels the need to regionalise their CCaaS and other reports. That’s as parts of the world focus more on their specific requirements and become more polarised in their choice of software. Especially adopting products that address regional or local needs
