Last month, I wrote an article that talked about the rapidly changing Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) market, as illustrated by the recent acquisition of Five9 by Zoom. CCaaS technology is now nearing the pinnacle of the hype curve, but the technology is more than just hype. It’s an indispensable way for companies of almost any size to craft an experience for their customers that builds trust, loyalty, and brand equity.
As a follow up to that article, and because of the rising demand for CCaaS technology coupled with the quickly changing landscape of CCaaS vendors, I thought I would write this month about the key factors when deciding which provider is right for your business.
As with many other technologies, each organization will have its own unique requirements, preferences, and necessary features and functionalities. Choosing the right technology provider, whether for cloud migration, security assessment and threat mitigation, or Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) / customer experience (CX), can have major implications for the long-term success of your business. It helps to have someone on the inside; an advocate and advisor with years of industry experience and an agnostic vantage point to help you select the right technology service provider.
Premier Team can be your single source for achieving successful cloud, connectivity, IT, and telecom projects. As industry insiders, we have the institutional knowledge, technology skillset, and leverage of existing relationships to find the solutions that make sense for your goals and processes—all at no cost to you. With no vendor biases, we’ll wade through the waters of countless options and pinpoint the right providers to achieve your technology objectives.
There’s a lot that goes into evaluating technology providers and selecting one that makes sense for your organization. You need experience in your corner—talk to Premier Team today!
With that said, if you want to venture down this road on your own, here’s a look at five deciding factors you should consider as you evaluate your options for a CCaaS provider.
- Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
- The total cost of ownership doesn’t just refer to the upfront costs, but also the costs to the total enterprise over time. These can include the cost to acquire both hardware and software, management, support, end-user expenses, and the opportunity cost of downtime, training, and other productivity losses during migration and maintenance periods. Knowing the initial costs of a provider is easy. It’s the operating costs and indirect expenses like maintenance, support, and licensing that amount to the TCO of the product.
- You can use the TCO to analyze how viable and valuable a technology service provider will be over the long term, and gain insights about which ones will bring about a positive return on investment (ROI) and foster long-term growth.
- Costs include acquisition costs, including licenses and subscription fees, costs of installation, and employee training. The TCO of a product should also include operating costs, which are the recurring costs throughout the lifespan and usage of the provider. You should also factor in resource costs, which can include any professionals like in-house technicians or third-party consultants needed to work with your provider to achieve optimum results.
- Customizability and Customer Experience
- Your customer’s experience is critical to the sustained growth of your business. It fosters loyalty, customer retention, and even consumer brand advocacy. Customer experience (CX) must be rooted in four key activities: Understanding customers and their experiences, analyzing the data collected from these experiences, acting on these insights, and continuously improving CX efforts.
- This means that it’s essential to have the power to customize and optimize your technology solutions not only to your processes, but also to match the needs and wants of your customers.
- It also means you need to have a platform in place that allows you to collect and analyze key performance metrics (KPI) associated with the customer experience.
- Personalization means you can leverage what you know about your customers and what you continue to learn about them, and provide them with the information and services they expect to nurture their journey with your organization and support your business goals.
- Scalability
- There’s so much talk about scalability these days, but the importance of this concept can’t be overstated. Scalability doesn’t just refer to the ability for a solution to grow as your organization expands; it boils down to, “How well a piece of software handles change in expected workload behavior situations.” This means flexibility in functionality, handling unexpected scenarios, resiliency and availability, and a sustained end-user experience during surges and peak times.
- Scalability can also save you money. It can expand as your organization does, but can also contract when necessary.
- Security
- It is estimated that only 5 percent of companies’ folders are properly protected from cyberattacks. These cybersecurity threats aren’t just a risk to your reputation, they can also be incredibly costly. Every minute, $2.9 million is lost to cybercrime, and the average cost of a data breach amounts to $3.86 million.
- It’s essential to choose solutions that value security as much as you do and employ providers that will fortify your security measures.
- Security isn’t just the task of your threat mitigation provider; it also is the job of your CCaaS / customer experience provider. They all should come equipped with robust security features to keep your vulnerable data protected.
- Geographic Redundancy
- Where is your service being provided? Where are their data centers? Geographic redundancy refers to the physical separation of data centers over multiple locations. This gives you an added protection in the form of resiliency against catastrophic events and natural disasters like fires, floods, and tornadoes. With a provider that relies on geographic redundancy, you can be sure that you will still have one data center up and running, even if another fails.
- For some organizations, geographic redundancy is the be-all, end-all because they rely on consistent operation. For others, this may only matter if the geographic redundancy is also paired with incredible network connectivity at every point throughout the service delivery, resilient integration, and affordability.
Within these five considerations, there’s a lot to navigate. There are plenty of factors to weigh and decisions to make. As your unbiased and objective advisor, we can help you narrow the field and choose the providers that make sense for your organization and your goals. Contact Premier Team, and we’ll guide you through the selection process.
