There’s a trend among some of the bigger technology providers to aggregate products under a single corporate offering. The idea is to sell you switching, workforce management, recording, quality monitoring, performance management, etc. (or some combination of these) in one integrated offering. While this might work for some users, there are at least a few reasons to prefer a mix-and-match model:
- Better pricing. Buying into the integrated-offering pitch dramatically reduces the number of competitors, and software vendors know it. If the only workforce management package you’re looking at must be provided by your recording/monitoring provider, there’s no opportunity to play one vendor against another.
- Loss of performance or functionality. Some vendors’ offerings are a better fit for your center than others. A vendor that offers broad functionality is simply less likely to have the best fit for some centers, because the incentive structures of large providers are different from smaller specialist firms. You can read about this dynamic in The Innovators Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christenson or you can just look at different offerings and prove it to yourself.
- Buying something you don’t need. Most call centers have built up their technology base over time, and may have systems that work just fine for them. Moving to an integrated package could, for example, mean buying a new recording system and walking away from a perfectly good one.
- No opportunity for leveraging hosted offerings. Hosted technology allows a contact center to get access to functionality without capital investment. Depending on the vendor, it can mean being able to match capacity and cost with business volume and eliminate technological risk. If your integrated-offering vendor doesn’t provide a hosted option (on a feature by feature basis), you’re out of luck.
A Better Way
The rapid adoption of standards has created an opportunity for systems to work together in ways they never could before. Buyers should demand that vendors adhere to standards and open architecture so they can integrate systems across vendor offerings. Here are some of the ways that vendors can make their systems “open” that will give contact centers the maximum potential for mixing and matching to meet their needs in the best possible ways:
· Integration-friendly databases. You’ll need to talk to your IT folks about this, but some things to look for include database views that are stable and easy to understand, and a data model that uses concepts common in the industry.
· Useful and open APIs. Application Programming Interfaces provide a way to get software to do things. It’s not enough that a package have an API – you need to insist that the API does what you need. For example, if your recorder has an API that can start and stop recording, you could theoretically have your workforce management system tell your recorder when and who to record.
· Services Oriented Architecture. SOA has great potential but it’s also likely to be a buzzword that vendors throw around carelessly. Find out what services the package is designed to support. What “dialect” is used to transfer XML messages back and forth?
· An industry-friendly data model. There’s not much standardization in the areas in which packages should work with each other, but the concepts should be included in all packages. How does the package define an agent, a customer, a customer’s telephone number, DNIS, etc., ? If your vendor understands how its package should work with other packages, then its software needs to use data elements that those packages share in common.
The more customers insist that packages work together, the more incentive there is for vendors to “play nicely with others”. There’s no good reason you need to buy one really good application and three mediocre, overpriced ones just because they’re designed to work together. Better to buy four great, less expensive packages and make them work well together. With standard protocols, “playing well with others” is well within reach – and should be a buyer requirement.
Jim Veilleux is President of VirtualLogger, LLC, a provider of call recording and quality monitoring services on a hosted basis.