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Choosing the Right Outbound Contact Center Solution

Author: Gordon Braswell
by Gordon Braswell
Posted: Oct 26, 2015

When evaluating an outbound contact center solution, it's important to comprehend the wide spectral range of offerings on the market. Some are merely automated phone dialers clothed as an entire solution. Still others are call center products - they handle only voice calls - pretending to be multichannel contact center solutions effective at handling voice, e-mail, mobile, social media and other engagement channels. So it's very important to drill down after dark labels and understand the solution's capabilities, and whether or not it really meets your needs.

Beyond the technology, you'll need to also consider the vendor itself and ask if it has the strategic partnerships to provide non-core functionality, like workforce management, and the financial backing to sustain itself, even yet in hard business times.

A well-rounded evaluation of the product, technology and vendor background will help ensure you settle on the best outbound contact center solution for your needs. Here are a number of the specifics to think about:

Product and Technology

  1. Unified Customer Experience: Does the merchandise provide a good experience for the buyer? If you place an Contact Centre Cloud Technology to a client, and they return the decision, would you readily match them to their history in the database? As a contact center manager, would you produce reports that present a unified view of most customer engagements across all channels?
  2. Native Multichannel: Although you might be focused on outbound prospecting or inside sales, you will need to expect your prospects will want to keep in touch with you on channels of these choosing. Outbound calls generate return calls, or return email. Does the answer natively support engagement channels beyond voice, or do they send one to somebody for anything beyond voice?
  3. Scalability: Scalability is more than simply the amount of agents the perfect solution is support. So how exactly does it scale across your organization? Does it integrate with back office systems or third-party big data analytics products?
  4. Availability: Can owner give you reliability and availability performance numbers? What are the failover and redundancy mechanisms that are constructed into the merchandise, and the vendor's operational processes?
  5. Deployment Options: Many organizations are hesitant to move completely to the cloud, despite being completely obsessed about the many advantages of doing so. Does the perfect solution is offer a transition path? Are hybrid public/private cloud deployment solutions? How can the seller plan to help relieve you to the cloud at your own personal pace?

Vendor Background

  1. Expertise: What's the pedigree of the vendor's management, technical and operations team? Can they indicate a distinguished background in the contact center industry?
  2. Partnerships and Backing: There are numerous adjunct contact center capabilities which are rightly not element of core outbound contact center functionality. With whom has the seller partnered, and just how do they deliver an integral solution? Does owner have strategic corporate relationships to deliver an entire solution, and/or to supply financial or other support? Exceed the vendor's website - oftentimes, many strategic relationships may be discussed only under non-disclosure agreements.
  3. Strategy: Can the seller clearly articulate a strategy and vision for the evolution of the modern outbound contact center, and does it align together with your view?

Market

  1. Analysts: What's the saying about the seller? Do analysts place owner on the competitive landscape in exactly the same place the seller self-identifies?
  2. Customers: Can owner provide reference customers? How closely are the wants of these customers aligned with your own? Do they validate what the vendor and analysts assert?

Using these ten starting points, you should be able to quickly evaluate a long listing of potential suppliers to create a short set of vendors to delve deeper with, including more in depth needs analysis, and possibly pilot programs

About the Author

GSN was created to realise the business benefits promised by the emergence of new open standards technologies such as as SIP and VoiceXML. http://www.globalspeechnetworks.com.au/ 

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Author: Gordon Braswell

Gordon Braswell

Member since: Oct 17, 2015
Published articles: 1

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