Important questions need to be asked of any potential Contact Centre technology provider before making the decision to start or indeed move over to another provider.
These are listed for guidance for the contact centre management and some particular questions specific to choosing a network or hosted partner have been included. There are various important areas to include: your required time to implement and delivery time for your business need, the guidance through the implementation, the infrastructure needs and demand on your business resource:
Implementation Requirements
- How long and complicated is a typical implementation?
- Are there additional support and service expenses?
- What support is provided to the centre and staff?
- What training is included within the set-up for everyone involved?
Providers’ Background and Experience
- What is their history and experience working with contact centre operations?
- Are the solutions provided theirs or provided by a third party – what happens when you want new functionality if not?
- Can the company provide client references?
- How many seats are currently in use and where, and what the solutions are used by their clients?
- Can the company provide examples of set-ups and use this experience with you?
Infrastructure Considerations
- What are the minimum requirements needed by the contact centre to start and will this involve upgrades of all the existing contact centre systems?
- How much resource will need to re-directed within the centre to start – IT and Telephony team time?
- Is there additional hardware or software to install on-site?
- What bandwidth and reliability issues should we address with our ISP?
- Are there additional contact centre costs required to integrate additional solutions in the future and existing back office applications now?
Data Protection and Access
- Can you access your data outside of the provided contact centre environment (e.g. sales or marketing queries and reports)?What remote tolls are provided and do they cost extra?
- How is your data separated from other clients’ data?
- How does the provider return data to you at the end of the agreement?
- How does the centre integrate their local data and applications with the hosted application?
Network/Hosting Environment
- What tools are given to help maintain control of the contact centre, minimise business risk, and maximise service quality?
- Does the provider give 24x7 monitoring and support?
- Superior providers give performance and campaign support – do they? Where are they based and is it included?
- What is included in the Service Level Agreements and does this include reliability and availability?
- What business continuity and disaster recovery procedures are in place for the contact centre and are they included?
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