Salesforce offers powerful CRM technology. For this reason, it leads the market, outselling its nearest competitor four to one – according to the IDC.
Now, the vendor is creeping further into the CCaaS space, with contact centers increasingly leaning on Service Cloud.
With native channels, case management tools, and AI-powered workflows, the platform allows contact centers to run more of their operations through the CRM.
In addition, in times of an economic slowdown, many operations are eager to converge their systems, work with fewer vendors, and streamline their spending.
Maybe this is why 2022 Metrigy research found that 55 percent of IT and CX leaders think CRM solutions will replace contact center platforms “within five years”.
Yet, there are significant barriers that CRM providers must break through first, with voice perhaps the most pressing.
A Powerful Tool, But Voice Is Still a Concern
The statistic above seemingly suggests that contact center providers are at risk of obsolescence. Yet, Robin Gareiss, CEO of Metrigy, doesn’t see it that way.
Commenting on the study, she stated: "I don't think it will go that far because voice will never go away as a customer interaction channel - and voice is really hard to do well.
“Though, CRM providers have started offering voice on their own or through partnerships, they simply aren't as reliable or advanced as contact center providers.”
Indeed, delivering voice infrastructures that are reliable and scalable is no small feat. Because of this, Five9 CEO, Mike Burkland, stated during a recent earnings call:
“A lot of folks believe they can enter the [CCaaS] space very quickly, and it takes them a lot longer than they anticipate.”
Moreover, many mid-market and enterprise contact centers already have significant complexity embedded in their voice architecture. As a result, they have become rooted in the technology of their current contact center platform providers.
Faced with these challenges, Salesforce has somewhat of a mountain to climb before its starts to challenge CCaaS market leaders – despite the release of Service Cloud Voice.
Additionally, those contact centers that have already deployed this – or added a telephony integration to Service Cloud – have uncovered teething issues regarding voice.
Here is an example of a struggle they may face.
When the Voice Workflows Just Don’t Flow
Despite its powerful process capabilities, the simple telephony integration Salesforce offers can’t match up – according to Pierce Buckley, CEO & Co-Founder of babelforce.
“Many service operations have found this problematic,” he says. “After all, if a telephony integration does not allow routing tools to dynamically look up custom objects during the IVR in Salesforce, make a clever decision, and do something about it – that can cost the business a lot of money.”
As an example of this, say the customer indicates they are looking to cancel, many operations will pull them into a shorter queue to increase the chance of retention.
Buckley delves deeper into this issue in the video below.
Phone Integration Problems with Salesforce from babelforce GmbH on Vimeo.
For now, such use cases require integrations with Service Cloud. Without these, the contact center could drop customer lifetime value dramatically.
