Considering Making a Contact Center Service Purchase? Check This Out.
If you’re in the market for new Contact Center Software, you are bound to have your own requirements that your new software must entail. Going into the service purchasing experience without making a list of your business requirements is like rowing out to a middle of a lake and throwing your own paddles in the water. Without preliminary research, you can easily get caught up in the bells and whistles of solution providers that end up lacking the reliable service and core features your business needs to excel. The hardest part is picking software that fits your needs as much as it claims it will in that introductory call. How do you find out? Simple.
At 3CLogic, we don’t just encourage you to bring up features and functionalities of our competitors, in fact, we like it. We want to know that you’ve been doing your research on the market trends and are up to date with all of the latest features available to you. When you bring up our competitors, we take that as our chance to prove to you why we are the more efficient selection for whatever business needs you may have. Our team is proud to say that we are constantly soaking in feedback from our customers for things they would like us to implement. We work hard to provide you with a main course of “what you need” with a healthy side serving of “what you want” to go with it. This also correlates with what you don’t want. We hear from customers on a daily basis why they’re considering our services, and what didn’t work so well for them with their last service provider. As a company driven to patch the holes of the Contact Center Services industry, we take all of that information in to churn out a machine that will make administering your business that much easier and cost effective.
Every Contact Center is different; therefor your business may require different features than any run of the mill Contact Center out there. Depending on your industry, you need the right inbound and outbound functionalities to best suite your customers, and provide your agents with all of the core essentials they need to handle your clientele. Regardless of what industry needs must be met, whether it is Mortgage, Insurance, and Political or Non-Profit, it is critical for all businesses to deploy a solution that has real time agent management and viewing.
Even the most highly trained business owners can fall victim to the shortfalls of “overly marketed” Contact Center Solutions that frankly, just don’t make the cut in the field. When selecting a solution that’s right for your business needs, try to keep these pointers in mind:
1) Scalability- Your business isn’t a concrete object, instead it’s a process. You are ever changing, ever evolving. You need software that can change with the times; that can sway with the ebb and flow of business. Getting stuck in a locked down agreement with no room for growth can put a screeching halt on your business endeavors. Make sure you ask in the beginning stages of your “interviews” about scalability. You want software that works with what YOU need, not the other way around. This will ensure that you can scale up or down as and when required.
2) Pricing- Let’s face it, times are tough. Now more than ever, people are really evaluating the products that will give them the best bang for their buck. This means that people are more apprehensive to make purchases than they may have been before. What does this mean for solution providers? Selling has to be administered to a “T”. Customers are reading up on competitors in the industry, and they’re coming prepared to these initial calls. As the customer, you deserve to know exactly what you’re spending your money on, before you spend it. So what do you do to prepare for a call with providers? Do your research. Get the competitive rates of each provider and compare them to all of the features being offered, including support. Make sure you come stocked with information and questions to fire away at your convenience. These sales people are there to inform you, and ultimately, work with your pricing flexibility. So, lock and load and be prepared to fire away with each service provider you set up a demo with. You might even find out that you catch some loopholes in a solution plan and save yourself the hassle of being stuck in a less than adequate agreement with software that’s about as useful as your average paper weight.
3) Support- You can purchase the best Contact Center Service in the world. It can shine, glisten and sparkle all you want but if you’re lacking the proper training and support, that’s about all it will be good for. Technology is always coming out with the latest and greatest updates and features. As a business owner who’s selecting a Contact Center software that ebbs and flows with their business demands (like we touched on earlier), you want software that’s always being patched and updated to provide you with the best features to assist your clientele. This means you need the proper support to train and assist your agents and representatives. Lacking proper training will make your agents less confident in their interactions with your customers, and believe me, it’s not hard for a customer to notice when an agent isn’t as on top of their game as they should be. You want to work with a company that provides your agents with extra training, demo videos and updated training manuals and booklets for them to access at any time. This way, if any confusion with a new software feature arises, it can be resolved before that agent gets back on the sales floor.
4) Reliability- That glistening, shining, sparkling Contact Center Service mentioned above may be what you want as an impressive “toy” made up of unnecessary bells and whistles. But let’s be honest with one another for a moment. In the business world, customers are much less impressed by the look of things than they are with the quality of service they receive. Your business should be taken seriously. You work hard to provide your clients with that level of satisfaction that they expect from you. Don’t fall victim to solutions that are un-reliable. You need to find a solution that’s reliable and scalable. If in any case servers go down, you want to make sure they’re up and running as soon as possible with the shortest downtime. Similarly, you need to be sure that your data is secure and protected when these down times occur. By picking a solution with data hosted in the cloud, you can assure your confidential business information is backed up and protected at all times. 3CLogic is proud to offer our customers a 99.9% uptime and servers hosted on AWS (Amazon Web Services) for complete reliability and security.
5) Features- This is probably the most important pointer that you need to come informed on before entering a demo with a provider. If you don’t know what features you need, it is easy to get off track and overwhelmed with all of the “ooh’s and aahs” of different software. What you really need to assess is what features you NEED versus what features you think are a neat implementation. Setting up a call with the right service provider will help you match your needs to their software’s offerings. You first need to decide if you want your Call Center to be on-premise based with in-location agents, or administered remotely with agents working from the cloud. With the right solution provider, you can even leverage a mixture of the two to mold to your business needs. Deciding which of these systems you want to use will have an effect on what features you will need to have included in your portfolio.
Depending on your industry, the IVR (Interactive Voice Response) feature is a professional way to greet, welcome and direct your callers to the proper branch. This is crucial for after hour interactions, as customers can call in and be directed instantaneously to that representative’s after-hours number or voice mail box. Here at 3CLogic, we make it easy for these representatives to check their voice mail box from a standard web browser, allowing them to answer inquiries on the go. This promotes ease and accessibility for times when a representative is out for the day or has stepped out to lunch.
Other key features to consider are things such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management) integration. You want to find software that fits seamlessly with your CRM system to efficiently and easily manage your leads. All reporting, records, and information is updated instantaneously through the 3CLogic system and your CRM software. This makes your job easier, and leaves less room for manual error.
These two features are just among the many that you need to make sure you have bundled in your new solution. Whatever software you may choose should be a reflection on you as a business. Curious about more features to look out for? Visit 3CLogic.com and see what we have to offer and feel free to compare them to competitors in today’s market. We at 3CLogic want your business to be successful, no matter what size it may be. Remember to pick a solution that fits with your business, not your business being forced to fit with a solution.
