Many contact centers today have reached a critical point. Their infrastructure hasn’t been replaced in years, and their window of opportunity is shrinking. They know they need to be providing better quality customer service, and they know they can’t do it without ripping and replacing some or all elements of their current platforms. These companies often feel overwhelmed by the amount of choices in the contact center marketplace.
With the idea of an IP-enabled contact center platform, companies are heading in the right direction. This is where they should be, particularly if they desire to offer high-quality, omnichannel customer support to meet rising consumer expectations while at the same time keeping costs under control and allowing for remote use and administration of the solution. Beyond that, however, many companies are stuck. Which solution is right for them?
You can’t blame them for being confused. There is a lot to choose from, and most IP contact centers offer different features sets and different benefits. Evaluating them can feel like comparing apples to oranges. What’s right for the organization will depend on what the company’s goals are for adopting an IP contact center solution, according to a recent article by Robin Gareiss, EVP and Senior Founding Partner of Nemertes Research. Nemertes recently conducted an in-depth evaluation of the IP contact center market to try and pinpoint the best solutions and apply them to contact center’s varying needs.
Most companies choose an IP contact center solution because they would like to keep costs down, according to Gareiss, who notes that the research found there is no universal "low-cost" provider in the contact center.
“This is typically the ‘biggie’ when we're working with our clients on contact centers,” she writes. “Avaya generally has the lowest opex [operating cost], though Interactive Intelligence performs well for smaller contact centers.”
For companies looking to implement certain elements and not an entire platform, the functionality you’re looking for will dictate which vendor you should head toward. In terms of stand-alone capabilities, Nemertes found that Avaya offered the lowest cost for IVR, predictive dialing, and skills-based routing, while Interactive Intelligence had the lowest costs for automatic call distribution (ACD) and call recording. NEC offered the most affordable solution for virtual hold technology.
“In analyzing all contact-center rollouts in our sample, regardless of capabilities deployed, Interactive Intelligence posts the lowest total first-year costs (capital, implementation, and operational metrics combined) for small contact centers, with $6,357 per contact-center license,” wrote Gareiss. “Avaya customers spend least for large contact-center deployments, at $1,007 per contact-center license. (Keep in mind that the small-rollout, per-license price is higher for small contact centers, but it would be multiplied by a smaller number of licenses for the total cost.)”
The full Nemertes report may be found here.