Delivering an exceptional customer experience – not just “good enough customer service” has become the goal of many call centers today. Customer expectations are a continually moving target and your competition isn’t standing still. The one sure bet is that outdated call center technology won’t be able to keep pace. Although we can’t answer all your questions about the future, here are some considerations and options for planning your next steps if you are considering modernizing your contact center technology.
Why consider making a change now?
Begin with a pause and reflection on what you’re missing with your current contact center technology. More importantly, what customer experience and bottom line benefits are possible with a move to a modern contact center?
- Stop paying for more than you use: switch to a software-as-a-service (SaaS or, more commonly now called cloud), pay-as-you-go model
- Eliminate complex, lengthy upgrades: roll out new features automatically (and never have to worry about “interoperability tables” again!)
- Make changes quickly: adjust IVR, routing, etc. in minutes—not weeks
- Gain greater reliability: with distribution of customer contacts across sites, including work-from-home agents, hot failover across all your sites, plus high availability SLAs
- Scrap clunky, bolted-on interfaces: with a true all-in-one, unified solution
- Protect your future: with a focused, industry-leading, and financially solid partner
Who are my other options?
Before building your shortlist, deciding the best architectural approach for your next generation contact center will help you focus on the right leading candidates. They generally fall into one of three categories:
- Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS): selecting this approach will not only provide a modern experience for both customers and agents, but also will continuously keep you ahead of the curve with future-proof, automatic updates. You’ll be in good company if you chose this route. Industry analyst Donna Fluss of DMG recently wrote, “The number of cloud-based contact center infrastructure seats increased by 20.9 percent in 2016. This growth came from companies of all sizes, most of which replaced an existing premises-based contact center solution.”
- Traditional on-premises: this can feel the most familiar of the options, but it does make it much more difficult to achieve the six transformational benefits of a modern contact center (see above). For companies that operate in remote international geographies not yet well served by CCaaS, this may be the best option for those remote locations. However, traditionally long deployment cycles are an added risk with going this route.
- Hosted single-tenant: paying extra operating expenses (OPEX) to the software provider or a third party to host traditional on-premises software my look “cloud-like” and appear to be a natural bridge. However, this can often lead to outcomes that are the worst of both worlds. Since the hosted model doesn’t provide automatic updates or lower the overall cost of service delivery, it mainly ends up shifting cost (plus an extra profit margin) to a 3rd party.
We are here to help, contact us for more info on what contact center technology makes sense for you. You may be surprised at what you find out.
