The Confusing world of Call Center Technology
One late afternoon in a modest conference room in Paragould Arkansas, we are watching a demo from an upstart company called Salesforce.
It was 2010, and it was not a particularly compelling demo. It passed the most important test though. It was clear to me what the product did, and what existing technology it sought to replace — it was a Siebel killer.
In those days the battle lines were fairly clean — Siebel VS a few other CRM vendors for your agent desktop. Avaya/Cisco VS a few other ACD vendors for your core call center routing functions.
Yes, the products were bulky, implementation took too long and someone always got fired during implementation, but you knew exactly what the product was supposed to do and what tools it competed with.
Goodbye Competition, hello Coopetition
Fast forward to a conversation I had last week with a CTO of a financial services company.
He simply wants to add live chat to his call center. What he doesn’t know is he already has four existing vendors that can do live chat.
In fact the same tool that provides his core telephone services includes live chat at no additional cost.
Some of the other options only do live chat, others are platforms that do live chat and a few other things.
All of them claim their product is best in class and have a Gartner quadrant report to back it up.
No matter which one he picks, the product will happily integrate with any other product he wants.
Remember the upstart company, Salesforce from 2010? It is now the default CRM option in the same way Siebel was back then. What is different is that unlike the previous era, Salesforce wants to become every tool for your contact center not just CRM — they even want to take over your phone, digital channels, orchestration to name a few.
Your telephone system provider who are now CCaaS providers, also wants to be your CRM, help you go digital, provide you digital assistants and much more. Your standalone live chat provider can inexplicably replace your CRM, phone system, and Quality assurance. When all your vendors are seemingly interchangeable, and integrate well with each other your job gets really complicated.
Consider that new buzzword — CCaaS (Contact center as a Service). A little over a year ago there was a half dozen legitimate contenders, and now we have over 15 legitimate options. This is a small win for competition, and a huge win for confusion.
How to Evaluate Contact center Tools today
If you have any role in picking technology for your call or contact center the old decision matrix will not serve you in the new climate. It is no longer best of breed for critical functions, and good enough for non critical functions. It is no longer about interoperability, as most of the options are interoperable. It is also no longer about vendor diversification vs concentration.
These decision frameworks are still useful but need to be tweaked for the age of Coopetition. Here are some tweaks:
- Articulate your service DNA and let this guide your every decision. You may call this your Service north star but avoid the flowery, meaningless words. Instead articulate what is core to your service DNA in the most straightforward way possible. Here is an example -Speedy, efficient and inexpensive service. The important thing is not what you include but what you leave out. In the example above there is nothing vague like “World class” or “delight”. It also unemotionally states the importance of cost. Incorporate these values into your selection criteria.
- Out with the old, and in with the new evaluation criteria. Granular capabilities list co-authored by the call/Contact center team and the technology team. When I mean granular, It needs to go deeper than use cases. Let’s go back to the financial services CTO who wanted live chat. When I pressed him on what he is looking for he responded with “Live chat capabilities with a pre chat form”, that is not granular enough. In a world where there are 20+ good options you need to go deeper. We need to know if the purpose of the chat is proactive or reactive, human based, fully automated or semi automated. We need to know if cross channel hopping is important, how much pre configuration is desired and a host of other factors. Only after the internal needs are captured in detail can you now start evaluating vendors.
- Get Help. Preferably unbiased help. If you have a day job running or supporting a call/contact center you can’t possibly understand all the players. Asking the vendor if their solution is best is a rhetorical question. It is my job to understand the industry, so I spend hours listening to webinars, earnings calls, and I still get caught off guard. Take Zoom for example, they now have a CCaaS option, and if you are already like Zoom you should at a minimum have a point of view on their technology.
The days of lining up vendors and scoring them on a simple weighted scale is over. Most vendors are both competing and cooperating with all the other vendors.
Connect with me on linkedin
Get my new book — Waiting for Service
