While contact centres started transitioning to CCaaS more than a decade ago, it wasn't until the pandemic that many waved goodbye to on-premise solutions and dived into the cloud.
According to McKinsey research, this acceleration compressed five years of digital adoption into only eight weeks.
Meanwhile, some estimate that the CCaaS market will double in the next five years. Such statistics represent an uptick in cloud confidence, with some businesses scrambling to replace their legacy contact centre solutions and, in the process, reimagine how they buy software.
Replacing an on-premise CCaaS provider with one that is cloud-first and API-driven means businesses have access to a plethora of third-party tools and integrations that were inaccessible before.
Indeed, with a core cloud infrastructure, contact centres can take advantage of this “plug-and-play” way of buying software and ever-expanding marketplaces.
In contrast, some operations were previously limited to one vendor's solutions as third-party tools did not integrate easily with legacy systems.
To uncover more, CX Today spoke with Matt Jones, Product Manager at EvaluAgent, who discusses changes in the buying experience of contact centre quality assurance software and how companies now evaluate providers.
A Preference for Best of Breed Tech Solutions
Every contact centre vendor has its strengths and cautions. After all, offering the best array of channels, cost models, and support systems in a crowded space is impossible.
As such, contact centres have historically chosen vendors based on particular requirements, only to be underwhelmed by the technical limitations of integrations, APIs and on-premise supplementary software – such as quality assurance systems.
Yet, legacy software left little space for alternatives, forcing the hand of contact centre leaders to choose between spreadsheets, a standalone tool, or a quickly developed, native add-on.
“They just had to take that vendor’s offering because it was the only one that worked with that core platform and offered any form of integration, such as the ability to playback calls, prioritise evaluations, and coach based on their associated meta-data,” said Jones.
But the move to the cloud has seen buyers ditch "jack of all trades" vendors and instead look for best-of-breed solutions. Major CX vendors, such as Avaya and HubSpot, have recently echoed this sentiment.
For instance, Alan Masarek, CEO at Avaya, recently told UC Today:
It’s all about programmability and extensibility. At this point, you have to be open... we're not going to do all elements of communications. There are many partner companies that we have, which are very important.
These partners offer greater choice and allow contact centres to select specialist solutions - such as EvaluAgent for QA – which seamlessly integrate with their environments.
Shifting Expectations
"Expectations are shifting," said Jones. "Driven by the changes everyone enjoys in the "consumer" world, I find the major of contact centre software buyers now expect free trial periods, seamless integrations with their technology stack, and have subject matter experts in each area of their contact centre who want the best tool for their individual department. "