How Do You Choose Your Contact Center Software?

There are innumerable options for you to choose from when you are looking at contact center software for your customer experience function.

How do you go about figuring out the right option for your needs?

This gets tricky because, more often than not, organizations sign up for features they really don’t need in the foreseeable future. Most features might end up being overkill for your business needs.

Then, adoption becomes an issue, and eventually, you don’t derive a lot of value out of this investment.

While this may not be a comprehensive guide to helping you choose the right contact center software, it would definitely point you in the right direction. I am going to take you through some scenarios and guide you on what you should do.

I want something that is affordably priced without any contractual commitments. My outbound and inbound needs would be split in the 80/20 ratio. I may want to use the same resources for both outbound and inbound needs.

You should opt for a cloud contact center platform that charges on a per-minute basis with an option for blended dialing. This would allow you to sign up for a platform on an opex model with the option for your agents to do both outbound and inbound – depending on the priorities.

My customers’ needs are complex as I sell them enterprise-level software with about 180 features they can pick and choose from. So, my agents need to be equipped with the knowledge to address my customers’ concerns and the technology to aid them in providing the best possible customer experiences.

You should look at an omnichannel contact center platform that is tightly integrated with your CRM, helpdesk software, and other best-of-breed IT systems. This would provide your agents with a single view of your customers across all your systems.

This will allow them to pull all customer interactions, and with effective knowledge management and FAQs, they should be able to get real-time assistance in addressing customer queries.

Your agents will not have to switch between multiple screens, and your customers will not have to be shunted from one agent to another.

I work in a regulated industry. My compliance needs to be a priority when it comes to customer communications. I want to be doubly sure that my agents are not misselling or overpromising to our customers.

You should opt for intelligent analytics as a part of your contact center platform. This will allow you to understand all text and voice communication deeply and pull out any misselling or overpromising by your agents. It would also be able to identify any training needs for your agents and flag repetitive mistakes.

This would help improve the efficiency of your contact center overall.

I want to integrate my contact center platform with my CRM and other software in my environment. This would allow me to have a comprehensive view of all my customer interactions.

You should ideally look at a platform that has APIs to integrate with other software solutions in the market. Better still, you should look for a platform that comes with pre-built integrations with industry-leading CRM and helpdesk software like Salesforce, Zoho, Zendesk, Freshworks, Leadsquared, and ServiceNow.

Anything else should be easily integrated with APIs.

My customer support and customer service workflows are very specific to my business. I want them to be customized for my needs, without which it would not be of much use.

You should ideally look at a platform that builds customizations and integrations as a part of their implementations.

Most providers come with a huge upfront cost for these, and this can completely make the implementation very challenging and unfeasible.

Have you come across platforms that offer this as a part of their implementation? Well, we do them.

Most of my customers are in the healthcare space, and they want our function to be compliant with HIPAA. I want my platform provider to be compliant with HIPAA.

Ideally, different verticals have different standards and regulations they expect you to adhere to. It is very resource and cost-intensive to get these compliances.

The easiest way is to opt for a platform that is compliant with most standards and regulations. For instance, we are compliant with HIPAA, PCI-DSS, TCPA, FDCPA, GDPRE, Reg-F, SOC2, FedRamp, and ISAE 3402 Type II specifications.

This makes your life easier when you approach customers to work as a part of their customer service function or to comply with your industry needs.

I am a BPO, and I run about 100 processes simultaneously for different customers in different verticals. Each of them wants their reports in various formats.

About 30% of the time spent by managers and supervisors in a BPO is spent generating reports. That is an enormous amount of time for you to be spending on it. Besides, report generation is such a complex function in most contact center platforms.

You should opt for a platform that allows you to configure and build your reports on the fly. Our report generation is one of the easiest functions of our platform, allowing managers and supervisors to spend their time wisely on other core activities instead of spending them on report generation.

My needs are very dynamic, and I would ideally want my platform provider to be available 24/7 to address my queries and needs.

More often than not, many platform providers offer 24/7 support, but you have to be mindful of their SLA commitments.

Imagine you write to them about a critical issue, and they say that it would take 72 hours for them to resolve the issue. That’s an epic disaster for your business.

Hence, sign up for a platform that offers better SLAs, and you should have the option to reach them on multiple channels and talk to a human agent seamlessly.

Would you agree that you would be happy with 24/7 support and access to support and tech resources on the phone, email, and WhatsApp?

That’s what we provide our customers, and that’s one of the reasons why we haven’t had a customer churn from us in the last eight years.

A one-size-fits-all approach does not work well in the contact center environment. You have to be clear about your needs, and you should use that to choose your platform wisely.

• How many agents are you going to have?
• What pricing model are you comfortable with?
• Are you planning to have agents work from remote and homes?
• Do your needs evolve, and are there spikes in your needs?
• What kind of integrations do you need?
• What kind of reporting do you need?
• What kind of calling do you need?

There are many such variables, and based on that, you should choose a platform that best suits your needs.

For instance, identify a platform that can give you only those features that you need, and they should be able to add and remove features and functionalities as your business needs change.

Choosing a contact center platform is more complex than we think, but it gets easier once you are clear about your objectives.