Call center technology selection and implementation can be a painstaking affair. Defining requirements. Developing a Request for Proposal (RFP). Entertaining the vendors and sifting through all of the responses. Gaining buy-in from all the decision makers. Negotiating contacts. Developing and executing installation, testing, and production plans.
If we spend so much time preparing for the addition of new technology or replacement of old technology, then why is it that we’re often less than thrilled with the results? Here are five common pitfalls:
No coherent contact center technology strategy that aligns with business needs and rationalizes the current investment- Limited (or no) collaboration between the contact center professionals and technologists in defining requirements and assessing options
- New applications don’t play well with existing ones, and manual processes fill in the gaps
- The new stuff gets put in to look like the old stuff with the promise of taking advantage of the new capabilities later… and later never comes
- User interfaces aren’t designed with users in mind… and no one follows up to uncover problems
You can’t re-write history, but you can take stock of what you thought you’d get, what you actually have, and where you’ve got gaps.
If you don’t have a contact center technology strategy, build a cross-function team to create one. If your staff performs time-consuming, unscalable, error-prone tasks on a daily basis (e.g., spreadsheet-based reporting), find a way to automate! If your application has 200 valuable features and your folks are only using a handful of them, spend time identifying their roadblocks.
It’s time to write some new history.