Cloud contact center providers need to keep in mind the specific industry vertical, regional, and size requirements of their target customers as they put together their products and go-to-market strategies. And buyers should take a structured approach to selecting a cloud contact center provider as they look to find the best fit in what’s become a sea of suppliers.
That’s the advice of Frost & Sullivan in its just released 2015 EMEA Hosted/Cloud Contact Centre Buyers Guide.
"Businesses considering the move to hosted contact centers must first assess their existing infrastructure, IT staff skill sets, and end-user needs in order to align their technology roadmap with broader business objectives," suggests Nancy Jamison, Frost & Sullivan Information & Communication Technologies Principal Analyst. "The next step is to develop a short list of hosted contact centre providers that most closely match their requirements after a thorough analysis of their capabilities and solution functionality."
That’s important, especially to the multinational area that is EMEA for which a cookie-cutter approach to delivering products and services doesn’t seem to be a good match, Frost & Sullivan indicates.
“Buyers must assess suppliers’ ability to offer region-specific support for their products,” Frost & Sullivan notes.
While the fragmented market can be confusing to customers, Frost & Sullivan notes that there’s already been a fair amount of consolidation of contact center systems providers, which are increasingly bringing features such as speech analytics, vertical market-specific features, and workforce management into the mix. Fewer and more feature-rich offerings on the market can, of course, be helpful to customers by providing a smaller field of players from which to choose.
As the July/August cover story of CUSTOMER magazine discusses, many people in the customer service arena believe that customers are best served by reducing the effort involved in completing a task and prefer fewer choices to a wide array of options. Of course, the story is talking about end users and not contact center buyers, but the laws of human nature could be applied to both types of individuals.
Then again, industry consolidation can lead to a less diverse and more expensive collection of offerings, which may not be as accessible to some organizations with fewer resources.