Too many businesses choose CCaaS platforms based on hype and instinct, not fit.
A fixation on specific features and specific industry reports doesn’t help here.
After all, while those studies have their place, what works for a 20,000-seat U.S. contact center may not be the best fit for a 50-seat operation in Carlisle. Plus, by the time those studies publish, vendors are often already a few releases ahead, so they aren’t always the most current source.
To choose the right solution, contact centers should start with their pain points, business model, and goals, then evaluate vendors accordingly.
Already, that’s a lot to think through! However, these seven questions will help contact centers cut through the noise, size up CCaaS providers, and zero in on the right fit.
1. Is This Solution Built for How We Actually Operate?
Contact centers should consider their key demand drivers, priority channels, and customer personas to align their proposition with the best-placed vendor.
For example, if 70 percent of the contact center’s interactions come through email and those need to be threaded like tickets, some vendors will handle that far better than others.
Alternatively, if the contact center communicates with lots of customers that don’t speak the native language fluently, translation tools may be required. Again, that’s a competency that swings from one provider to the next.
As Nerys Corfield, Director of Injection Consulting, summarized: "It's about understanding where your priorities lie and matching the tech platform accordingly."
Yet, perhaps most crucial is to assess those demand drivers, what causes them, and how the new architecture could help to automate or transform those differently.
2. Will This Platform Set My Team Up for Success?
In the discovery phase, engage with key contact center stakeholders, from agents and supervisors to workforce planners and quality analysts, to determine what is most important to them.
Then, when assessing solutions, pay special attention to the agent experience. Understand how intuitive the UI is, the AI assistance features, and how many apps agents might have to navigate.
That last point is crucial. Contact centers should consider the adjacent systems agents dip in and out of and size up the integrations.
Out of the box is great. But also look at the nuts and bolts. Is it just providing an iframe, or is the application fully embedded? These are critical considerations.
Corfield also stresses that reducing agent cognitive load should be a huge priority, especially as the tasks they run into get more complex with automation. She noted:
Tools that surface context-aware prompts - like 'Don't forget this,' or 'They mentioned that' - can help tremendously, especially in nuanced scenarios, like complex insurance policies, for example.
3. Will We Have the Insights We Need and the Means to Action Them?
Ask the C-suite and team leaders what KPIs they care about and consider whether the CCaaS platform enables a clear view of those key customer, employee, and business metrics.
Yet, there’s another big question here: how will the contact center make time to use that insight and convert it into action?
Once buyers ask themselves this question, others will arise. For instance, do we want agents to see their individual and team metrics? Will we use Power BI, Tableau, or native reporting tools? Can we create custom metrics on-platform?
Again, this comes back to aligning the CCaaS platform with the contact center’s operational reality.
4. Is This Platform Future-Proof?
Don’t only think about the core features that are necessary right away. Consider roadmap capabilities and whether they align with the contact center’s longer-term ambitions.
One ambition here may be to switch to another CRM platform. In such situations, it’s critical that the CCaaS platform integrates closely with not just the current CRM, but will knit tightly with the future solution, too.
Contact centers should also get guarantees from their providers that they will maintain an open data approach, so they can shift their data onto other systems without facing barriers.
The Information recently called out two high-profile CCaaS providers for establishing these walled gardens, preventing teams from sending data to rival solutions, and stalling their customers’ AI strategies.
Yet, most importantly, Corfield stresses that a CCaaS platform needs a clear-cut ongoing management strategy. She said: