They clearly have the expertise to see how an underperforming contact center is impacting their business. However, they feel less certain when it comes to choosing a replacement solution. This is completely understandable.
Contact center technology has become more sophisticated over the past few years. Here is a quick primer of recent advances.
1) Omnichannel. This gives customers more options for how they can interact with your company by providing not only telephone, but also chat, email or other form of communication. Contact centers built using PBX functionality (office telephone system) lack the ability to support a variety of interaction channels.
2) Reporting and Analytics. Modern ACD’s developed specifically for contact centers are designed to collect detailed reporting metrics and to provide out-of-the-box reports and tools to build custom reports. Old PBX systems lack reporting detail because they don’t track and store the metrics needed by contact center managers.
3) Automation. This is a broad category that ranges from “smart-routing” of contacts all the way to the use of artificial intelligence to provide more effective self-help and pre-screening services. Older PBX systems never envisioned, nor were built, to support these futuristic capabilities.
4) Quality Management. Today’s contact center tech allows managers to record, review and provide coaching on all interactions. Older PBX systems don’t offer native tools to let you do this.
5) Workforce Management. Premium contact center technology helps managers accurately forecast contact center demand and schedule and manage agent schedules. PBX systems lack this native capability and may even lack basic integration capabilities needed to support this functionality.
The takeaway here is that older PBX systems work fine for office communications. But they lack advanced and specialized features needed for a contact center.
So, when the contact center begins to experience higher operating costs and/or delivers sub-par results, it may be time to consider a upgrade.
But how does one do this quickly and with the best outcomes?
Based on our research, there are three key questions that will help shape your search. These questions are:
- Do I have clear solution requirements?
- Is owning and managing technology the best use of our resources?
- What does success look like and can I quantify it?
In my next post, I will explain why these questions are so helpful, and talk about how to quickly identify the right vendors and products.
However, if you want to skip to the end, you can get the companion whitepaper now.
