Customer service is a key focus for any organization trying to achieve differentiation in the market. The contact center serves as the primary interaction point between your company and your customers, making it critical that your contact center solutions support your efforts to drive customer satisfaction. To find the right fit with the proper customer support solutions, you’ll need to do a contact center solutions comparison. To complete this task, you’ll need to consider your needs, budget and size before examining the available solutions.

Contact Center Solutions Comparison Starts with Needs

Prior to conducting your contact center solutions comparison, you must develop a clear understanding of your needs. Do you plan to outfit an in-house, multi-channel contact center platform, leverage virtual contact center software to support at-home agents, or are you simply seeking a software solution that will make your agents more efficient? You may also need a robust approach to forecasting for anticipated volumes, scheduling according to volume and agent availability or computer telephony integration to ensure your agents have access to all information necessary to complete all customer interactions. Clearly defining these needs is critical to completing your contact center solutions comparison.

Your Budget is an Important Contact Center Solutions Comparison Element

Determining your budget is an important step in your contact center solutions comparison. If your needs outpace your budget, it may be necessary to consider a hosted contact center solution. This approach allows you to leverage contact center solutions hosted on the provider’s servers, eliminating significant upfront capital investments and allowing you to only pay for the services and features you use. Hosted contact center solutions are billed on a subscription basis and fall under your operating expenses. On-premise solutions require a larger upfront capital outlay, although this figure can be reduced if you already have the necessary hardware and infrastructure in place. You also stand to gain financial benefits from the efficiency and productivity improvements you realize from the selected solutions, but take the conservative approach in determining this impact on your budget.

Company Size is a Key Consideration in Your Contact Center Solutions Comparison

The size of your company can easily dictate the systems you should include in your contact center solutions comparison. If you have just a few seats to manage, you could easily leverage an open source solution or even the basic offering from Zoho in Zoho PhoneBridge. If you have a larger organization with multiple locations that must deliver seamless support through one number, Avaya may be the better choice. As you conduct your contact center solutions comparison, evaluate the company size targeted with provider solutions. Search for scalability and flexibility so the solution will ebb and flow according to your call volume peaks and valleys, as well as your company growth.

Don’t forget about the features as you conduct your contact center solutions comparison. It’s critical that the features you seek match with your needs and your budget. Any investment in a contact center solution should deliver results you can measure in improved agent performance, increased first call resolution and reduced call handle time. If these benefits are not guaranteed, your contact center solutions comparison is not complete.