The growth of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings is well acknowledged, with Gartner now estimating that it will rise from $105 billion in 2020 to $140 billion in 2022.
And as we have already seen with the likes of Slack, Atlassian and Hubspot, you don’t necessarily need a partner to implement SaaS applications for you.
It leads to some commentators questioning the role of the reseller or systems integrator in the contact centre arena. Now, I might be biased, but I feel that there’s an important role for partners to play.
While 69% of UK contact centres deploy cloud technologies, according to ContactBabel, there’s plenty of scope to take things further. Today, applications are more likely to be focused on simpler areas like call routing (with a 64% take-up), than more complex ones, such as workforce management (46%) or speech analytics (35%). Meanwhile, some sectors, such as manufacturing and travel, lag behind the likes of ‘born in the cloud’ companies in terms of take-up.
A ‘good’ partner can play the role of trusted advisor, but in the context of moving to a cloud contact centre, there’s some important factors to consider as part of the conversation.
Customer Fears
Top of the list among most customers’ worries is losing control of their contact centre operations.
As a first point of contact for customers, the contact centre holds huge significance to brand value and customer relations.
It takes a great deal of trust to hand that responsibility over to somebody else – so it makes sense that many businesses would want to keep a close handle on their contact centres, rather than involving a partner.
Related to this is the second big fear: that being locked into lengthy master service agreements (MSAs) will cause problems when changes are are needed later down the line.
Despite the availability of SaaS models among contact centre providers, the nature and duration of many MSAs hasn’t caught up in every instance.
Customers are wary of signing up for something that might not meet their future needs. Again, this is understandable.
Finally, many customers don’t want to have their operations slowed down as a result of outsourcing.
Agility and responsiveness have rarely been so valuable (just ask anyone who’s shifted from an in-office to work-from-home contact centre setup in the past year), and customers want to feel confident that, if they choose to work with a partner on their contact centre solution, this won’t be at the expense of working at speed.
A Good Partner Knows Their Place in Delivering Customer Priorities
Working with a partner shouldn’t mean losing control of the roadmap, but customers will only be reassured of this if you make it clear you know your role.
Typically a customer won’t want to build their own contact centre, but they will want to manage the running of it (part of a broader shift away from ‘buy’ platforms to ‘build’ platforms that I’ve observed).
In this case, your role is to accelerate the build process and then let them get on with running it. It sounds simple, but you’d be amazed how often it goes wrong.
If your customer is still dependent on you to update their interactive voice response (IVR) system for every bank holiday or promotional holiday months after the final build has been delivered, then you’ve failed to know your place.
A Good Partner Documents Everything They’ve Built – and Hands it Over
The most obvious benefit of a build solution (it’s bespoke to your business and its needs) can feel like a downside when you need to fix something and there’s no standardised troubleshooting guide.
This arrangement makes no sense.
The IP on anything we build at Zing is owned by the customer. We document everything we build and share it with them.
We take them through the build process and teach them how the system works, and how it can be adapted, fixed, and improved on when new needs arise.
Customer shouldn’t be dependent on partners once the build is complete. And partners shouldn’t want that either. (Remember that a good partner knows their place.)
I’m aware that this isn’t a typical approach. But it’s the one that, in my opinion, delivers the greatest value to the customer. And, accuse me of blind faith here if you like, I believe that providing value to a customer is a better way to build a future working relationship than forcing them into dependency.
This opens up more opportunities for the customer to keep improving their service and, in turn, for us to keep improving ours.
Which begs the question: shouldn’t this be the typical way of doing things? For good partners, it already is.
Guest blog by Jordan Edmunds, business development manager at Twilio consulting partner Zing.
