16 Learnings for Navigating the Technology Landscape

Navigating the contact centre technology landscape is a critical component of a contact centre leader’s role.

This is why the CCMA (Call Centre Management Association) has released its latest research. The research provides 16 learnings that address preparing for change, putting the right people and resources in place, selecting technologies and partners and implementation and change management.

The 16 learnings to help you navigate the technology landscape are:

Preparing for Change

• A roadmap underpinned by CX/EX goals drives a more proactive approach to upgrades as opposed to ‘fixing problems’.
• Decision-making led outside of the contact centre brings different pros and cons versus leading from within the contact centre. There is no right or wrong approach – each organization should decide based on its own circumstances.
• Devolved decision-making and technology choices may be most appropriate where there is disparity across business units.
• Centralized decision-making and platform choices can help to join up customer journeys, and leverage data and analytics capabilities that reside outside of the contact centre.
• Staying abreast of technology is an integral part of every contact centre leader’s role.

Putting the Right People and Resources in Place

• People who can influence effectively across both IT and Operations environments help to ensure customer and user requirements are fully reflected in technology choices and implementation.
• Growing demand for these roles creates career opportunities for technology-orientated people in the contact centre.
• Agile methods are commonplace and can vastly improve speed to market and cross-functional collaboration but bring potential pitfalls, for example minimum viable products (MVPs) launched with core business needs missing.
• Consider the principle of ‘Minimum Customer Detriment’ when developing any MVP.

Selecting Technologies and Partners

• Even for organizations with substantial in-house development resources, it typically makes best sense to buy in core telephony and CRM systems. However, building the connections between systems and the data and analytics layers are two areas where organizations can create IP and competitive advantage from building themselves.
• New benefits and use cases can be tempting, but contact centre leaders should be realistic about the relevance of these benefits and the resource required to operate them, to avoid paying for features they end up not using.
• Giving partners full sight of business context and challenging them to propose innovative solutions typically yields better outcomes than focusing on technical specifications alone.

Implementation and Change Management

• Using an integrator can be beneficial versus working with vendors directly, but integrators may not be completely impartial.
• Having a clear roadmap with room to flex is imperative for any implementation, especially as there is a natural tendency to underestimate time required and complexity.
• It’s essential to clearly document business requirements up front and not automatically assume that IT or vendor teams will understand what users need.
• As challenging as technology change can be, human change is usually the bigger challenge.

“Until now there has been a distinct lack of information resources that present the key considerations and practical steps for technology selection and implementation.

“We conducted this research to help fill the gap: to provide insight to any contact centre leader who is or may be contemplating investing in new solutions,” explains CEO at the CCMA, Leigh Hopwood.

“What are the important things to get right, and what might go wrong? I hope this report will shed some light on these questions.”

The research is a free download from the CCMA website