When debating the difference between buying a contact centre solution off the shelf or building your own bespoke, the analogy often used is houses: is it better to buy one, or build your own?
Like most analogies, this one is best understood by a look at its extremes.
On one end of the scale you have Grand Designs, with all the architectural flourishes and leaky budgets that typify every project. The flipside would be something like a neat three-bed home on a suburban plot – the kind where the developers pay the stamp duty for you, so you don’t complain when you realise the garage is too narrow to fit your car in.
Clearly, both options have their upsides and downsides. Ultimately the decision comes down to priorities, preferences, and, of course, budget.
Where the comparison fails is that it doesn’t respond to three key changes that have occurred in the contact centre and business communications marketplace in recent years:
- Consumers want to be contacted anytime, anywhere, on any device
- There is an increased responsibility on contact centre agents to meet the shifting expectations of both the consumer and organisation
- Organisations are turning to consolidating their reporting to keep up with the tools and platforms in place
The need to keep up with these changes, and maintain a high customer service level, strengthens the argument in favour of building a custom solution from scratch. But that, unavoidably, comes at a higher cost – both in terms of cash and resources.
It’s worth noting that the ‘buy’ option often doesn’t work out that much cheaper either, as the costs start to stack up as you add more users to the license, but that’s a topic for another day.
In this circumstance, the ideal solution that emerges is one that combines elements of both the build and buy approaches.
Buy – then build
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Jordan Edmunds[/caption]
Today, it’s possible to purchase a contact centre framework off the shelf that you then customise depending on the specific needs of your business.
To extend the housing analogy, the model is similar to HUF HAUS – the German prefab home company established in 1912.
With HUF HAUS, prospective homeowners lay out their vision (and everything they want to see in their future house) with the help of an architect. Once the plans are drawn up, the various bits of the building are constructed offsite and then finally pieced together on the plot that’s been set aside.
In the world of contact centres, the equivalent process is known as CPaaS – which stands for “Communications Platform as a Service”. This involves working with expert partners to co-create customised solutions that fit your specific budgets and timeframes.
There are tools out there which allows you to get the best of both worlds, as you buy the framework – essentially a toolkit – and then customise on top of it to suit your specific needs.