From AWS to RingCentral, Google to Zoom – every enterprise communications vendor seems to be entering the contact center quality assurance (QA) space.
In doing so, service teams may leverage their QA solutions, move on from spreadsheets, and secure several benefits.
But, not all QA solutions are equal, and it’s a mistake to confuse fresh-to-market offerings with third-party, best-of-breed tools, like evaluagent.
Everyone Wants a Piece of the QA Market
There are many motivations driving enterprise communications vendors into the QA space.
For instance, many can repurpose existing conversational intelligence tools as Auto-QA solutions fairly effortlessly, opening up new revenue streams.
They can also bundle a QA solution within a wider CCaaS offering and offer an attractive price differential to third-party providers.
In addition, these vendors may pull more data into their ecosystem to power the various contact center AI tools they’re bringing to market.
As such, it’s an attractive area to drift into.
However, as they do so, it’s critical that these vendors fully understand how to deliver on QA use cases beyond “we can score 100 percent of your interactions using pre-set scoring criteria”.
Only with this know-how can contact centers orchestrate seamless customer journeys.
Sharing an example of this, Nadine Edmondson, Product Marketing and GTM Director at evaluagent, told CX Today:
Consider solutions like real-time agent assistance. To effectively implement such tools, contact centers need to understand where agents require support, rather than blindly applying technology without clear objectives.
With evaluagent, contact centers can be sure that such implementations target operational inefficiencies, estimate ROI, and build business cases.
Yet, this is only one example; best-of-breed vendors can bring much more to the table.
The Argument for Best-of-Breed
After evaluating QA solutions, many businesses – typically large enterprises – select a best-of-breed vendor. Here are three of the core reasons why.
1. Mature, Purpose-Built Capabilities
Best-of-breed vendors present a deeper QA stack. For instance, while some conversational analytics may allow brands to score based on out-of-the-box metrics, they stop short of translating automated insights into actionable steps.
Moreover, the solutions within that stack function as part of one cohesive platform. Consider evaluagent: its Auto-QA scores are based on customer-defined metrics, aligned to existing KPIs, and can trigger positive recognition and coaching recognitions.
Fresh-to-market solutions are often more fragmented, with providers accumulating separate tools and pushing them together. As Edmondson noted:
The market has seen some consolidation through acquisitions, which may not yield the expected advantages from a single-vendor approach, at least not in the short term.
2. Ensured Data Ownership
According to Edmondson, single-vendor CX stacks sometimes lead to vendor lock-in, which restricts flexibility and control over data. She said:
Best-of-breed vendors allow for better data ownership and flow between systems, ensuring that strategic assets like data remain accessible and can be used to meet business objectives.
Moreover, QA providers often collaborate with best-of-breed workforce management (WFM) software providers, enabling contact centers to piece together a comprehensive workforce optimization (WFO) strategy.
The tight partnership between evaluagent and injixo, and its most recent relationship with Assembled is an excellent example of this.
3. Centralized Performance Management
Global enterprises and their outsourcing partners often leverage different contact center platforms across their customer service operations.
If this trend extends into QA, businesses risk siloing performance management.
Yet, with a third-party solution, organizations can overlay disparate systems. “This provides a holistic view of the organization’s operations, avoids siloed data, and leads to new cross-operation performance insights,” concluded Edmondson.
4. Specialist Integrations
Best-of-breed QA systems can integrate with a range of contact center solutions, including call recording, ticket management, CCaaS, and CRM systems.
In doing so, they can digest individual conversations, cases, and any associated metadata. This helps streamline the evaluation process and allows for the re-import of conversational intelligence data generated back into call center systems to provide more automated business intelligence, analysis, and personalization.
Such integrations differentiate best-of-breed providers. While CCaaS vendors often offer excellent in-house integrations, they’re less proven at delivering QA data across enterprise functions.
Find Out for Yourself
While tech convergence seems an attractive ploy to cut costs, customer experience leaders must ensure their technology serves the needs of the contact center.
Best-of-breed QA vendors like evaluagent go the extra mile to showcase how their tech optimizes contact center performance, efficiency, and ROI.
Moreover, the evaluagent funnels QA data into the broader CX system, so every department—from sales and marketing to HR—can act on customer interaction and agent performance data.
To find out more about how evaluagent does all of this – and more – visit: www.evaluagent.com
