Money Saving Tips for Buying a New Contact Center Platform (CCAAS)

00:00Hi, guys, Tom Laird here. You've heard me break down contact center technology on the podcast time and time again. Now it's time for me to help you with your challenges. As your contact center technology advisor through our new company, Expivia Digital, I can help you with things like CCaaS selection, any type of AI implementation, and nice studio and integration services. It's the same honest advice you hear on the geek applied specifically to your operation. Visit ExpiviaDigital.com to get started. That's ExpiviaDigital.com. This is advice from a call center geek, a weekly podcast with a focus on all things call center. We'll cover it all from call center operations, hiring, culture, technology, and education. We're here to give you actionable items to improve the quality of yours and your customer's experience. This is an evolving industry with creative minds and ambitious people like this guy. Not only is his passion call center operations, but he's our host.

00:54He's the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing Group and the call center geek himself, Tom Laird. Welcome back everybody to another episode of advice from a call center geek, the call center, contact center podcast. So we try to get you some action while items take back in your contact center, improve the overall quality, improve the agent experience. Hopefully improve your customer experience as well. My name is Tom Laird. I am the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing. Expivia is a 600 seat call center outsourcer located here in Northwestern PA. What's up everybody? Hey, So, I've been doing podcasts on Friday, been getting a ton of questions, cause I think it's, you know, it's getting into the almost later stages of third quarter. People are starting to plan for 2023 from a contact center standpoint already. So, I wanted to, I've kind of done this before but kind of updated some of the things that I've talked about, but to give you some tips when you're going out and looking for new contact center software, whether you are a premise based solution, trying to move to the cloud, whether you have a cloud-based solution that you're really not happy with, whether there's other tools that you're kind of interested in.

02:08I want to give you some real tricks. I'm going to give you some real world pricing of what you can expect to play for moving to the cloud. And just some things that, me as a consultant as well, and kind of taking people on this journey for when they need my assistance, some of the things that I always make sure I talk to them about and make sure that they look out for from the pitfalls to some of the things that some of the providers will kind of do. Nothing terrible, but just some things to look out for that you can kind of make sure that you're maximizing your purchase. I think that's the best way to put it other than kind of maybe avoiding pitfalls. So I don't know, there's seven or eight of these different tips that I think I have that can help you as you kind of go through this process of purchasing.

02:55Now you guys know I don't really sell at all right here on the podcast. So again, I'm not selling my services here, but for the first thing that I wanna really talk about is you need to find an advocate, you need to find what we call a broker, a consultant, a referral partner, you'll hear all those different words. Especially if you're a, maybe a smaller contact center, 100 seat or under, that doesn't really know what's out there, right? So whether it's me, whether it's some other awesome people that are out there that can guide you. I mean, there's an organization's office that just set up to do this. Find somebody that can help you. I just did a big video on LinkedIn yesterday that there's a huge misconception that if you use a referral partner, a consultant, a broker, whatever you wanna call it, that it's gonna cost you more And that is that is 1000% not true the pricing structure is absolutely the same whether you do it by yourself Or whether you use a partner. I will say that the majority of partners will not charge you The payment structures are pretty close across the board there could be some different things here and there, but it's not enough to sway they're really good people like me and a lot of others to sway you to something that is more beneficial to us. Everybody wants to just help and try to obviously get paid to, right? I mean, we're being totally honest, but to help you get into the right platform that is perfect for your organization. So I'm going to talk now about some of the things that I would go through if any of you are my customer out there or, or you use me to kind of help. And some of the things that some of the other guys and gals would do as well. So the first thing that I'm going to tell you to do, which I think is pretty obvious, but maybe not to the impact that you're thinking is to scope everything out. So we always do two columns, what you need, and those are the things that you know about a lot of times, and then what you want. And a lot of times what you want, you might not even know some of the technologies that are out there.

05:06Again, that's why having a partner is cool because we know and we utilize all this stuff all the time. What integrations do you need? Maybe you don't have integrations right now. Maybe you're not doing screen pops. Maybe you don't have any type of integrations to your CRM or to a dispatching service or anything that is different for your business. Make sure that we're scoping No, no, no. Talking about tools, right? What is speech analytics? Do you need it in your organizations? Are you big enough where you you need workforce management? I is that something you've never had, right? Advanced routing and getting into workforce intelligence and really getting into some of these advanced routing things that a lot of these organizations have that maybe you haven't heard about. Really cool stuff. The other thing is, you know, talking and scoping through when you're talking about some of these organizations and looking at what S native to the platform and then what we need to have added on, right?

06:04that I always use blocking and tackling, right? Just full army I'm just going to use voice chat, email, that kind of stuff. Or do you need a lot of articles? Do you want a really robust platform, right? And that can kind of be swayed or have that partner or have you start looking for certain organizations over others, right? And obviously there's a huge piece of this is how logically advanced is your organization, right? Do you have programmers that can help and set things up and do some advanced things, or are you as the call center manager basically the IT, right? We see that a lot, right? And that plays into what platform you're gonna use as well, right? So there's a lot of different variables that I think kind of come into play when you're first starting to kind of scope out and whether you are doing it yourself or using a partner to have them kind of go and choose who they think would be best for you.

06:59I will tell you that if you're, Again, if you're using a partner or even you yourself, just start smaller, right? Don't go out and do 10 demos, right? Cause I think it confuses the whole pie, right? Right, I always suggest to do three partners or three contact centers that I think would fit, you know, your organization or start, even if you're not using a partner, start with three, right? Really scope out everything that they have and then start to think, wow, you know, maybe there's some other things that we do need, right? But don't go crazy on demos early, start with three. And I will tell you, you know, there is a huge selection of vendors out there, right? But really for most organizations, right? There's really about maybe nine or 10 that I think really are in play in today's world, right? Which really isn't that many, right?

07:53So depending whether you're enterprise or whether you're smaller, there's gonna be a really good fit for you. We just got to know kind of who to talk to and I think who would be the right fit for you guys. All right, the next thing is I'm gonna tell you if you're doing this on your own to negotiate absolutely everything, right? So you negotiate your seat price, negotiate your implementation costs, negotiate what add-ons they can give you. Everything that they kind of throw at you, I mean, I believe that you should negotiate and most groups will work with you, right? So let's talk about, let's talk about price. I know what you are going to see in the in the-cast world. [pricing remark omitted]

08:57Why would you use one or the other? Well, number one, if you have work from home, right, has changed us a lot. So work from home, most everybody, including myself, we're using a per agent license, right? So every single agent we're paying for a certain price per month, right? When we were in-house, I did it the other way, right? Because if we had multiple shifts in one agent using that same. little sha, but it is a higher price, so work from home And I I think most people 80 90% of people now have moved to the other structure of having the. Agent pricing. What will you pay? And I would say for a high-end CCaaS platform, right? Lots of different variables, right? What type of some, what is, what is included? Are there other, you know, is QA in their QM platform, is that included? But you know, anywhere from, let me just start with this number, but don't maybe get excited about this number, right?

10:13[pricing remark omitted] is kind of the range, you can go a little bit lower,

[Gap 10:21–10:46: no reliable transcription]

10:46So that's another thing that you want. Hey, listen, I know you're quoting me this poem, but can you give me the all in number And what they're going to say, well, I don't really know your taxes. I won't know your minutes. And you can say, yeah, you do. You kind of have a rough estimate of what that's going to be. They don't like to give that to you. Um, but I will tell you that's about what it will come out to be. Um, and, but I would, I would, I would ask them to see how open and straightforward they are, you know, to that question. I think that's a, that's a big piece of, of obviously the budgeting aspect. All right. The next thing is. Don't shy away and you can save a The CCaaS organization almost wants you to use them because it takes a lot off their plate, so they're a lot cheaper and they're really good.

11:56I have seen good implementations using this. There can be hiccups just like anything, but for the most part, I would not shy away from it. That's how we were set up with a third party, so that's something to definitely think about when you see that kind of setup fee. And if it wows you like, oh my gosh, make sure that you ask about a third party implementer. They can do it cheaper and most of the time they'll do it way, way, way faster than the actual group. The other thing you need to not be careful of but just understand that a lot of organizations, they white label other people's products, right? So depending on who you're talking to or what you're talking to, I would ask that question. I'm not gonna get too deep into that because I don't think it matters that much But just understand what you're buying.

12:43Is it the native platform of the group that you're talking to, or are they white labeling somebody else's product as theirs? Doesn't happen too often, but for a couple, two, three really big vendors, this is kind of how they operate. Again, I don't think it's bad, but I think some things do get lost in translation between the two organizations sometimes. And so that's, again, a consultant or a referral partner will know this stuff, and they'll kind of be able to guide you with that. The other thing is, a lot of organizations, and I see this all the time, they try to get too cute with it, and they send out this giant RFP. They send it out to all these 910 different vendors, and maybe they get seven of them back, and they have no idea what they're looking at. They don't really understand what the stuff that they're getting back.

13:34if you're gonna do an RFP, make sure you have some hardcore call center, telephony guys, IT guys on your team that can kind of translate what you're getting. Because a lot of times, you don't know what you don't know. You don't really even understand what they're talking about. And what I've seen so many times is RFPs go out, they come back, everybody's petrified because they don't really know what they're doing. Then they talk to somebody like me or talk to a group. Then we go through the process this way, having these conversations, doing those demos, and they're like, oh my God, I get it. So again, for a huge giant contact center software, I get it, the RFP is a process because you probably have the people in place, but just understand if you don't have the people in place, an RFP is kind of, it can sometimes just drag things on and really defeat the purpose.

14:27So I guess that's kind of the biggest tips that I can really give you. You know, there's just, there's so many things. I think the bottom line is, you know, and I know I've said it a couple of times here is you really don't know what you don't know. There are so many amazing pieces of technology that are out there now, that your wish list, your dream, right from a platform standpoint can come true. And people get super disappointed when they just talk about the things that they need, don't understand the other stuff, get it implemented. And they're like, oh my God, I didn't know we could do that. And then again, then you don't have it already in your setup fees. So you got to pay a professional services or you got to pay somebody else and it costs you more money in the long run, right?

15:12So really understanding every technology piece that's out there, leveraging everything that you can and then really just seeing the differentiation of a lot of the players, right? I will tell you as well that if this was five years ago, one of the number one things on my list would have been really uptime, right? So you're not having obviously any downtime for your contact center. The core players in the space have gotten really good at this, I'm knocking on wood right now. And I think that you should ask that questions but there's gonna be five layers of nine, six layers of nine, four layers of nine, right? They're up a ton. And I don't think that that is as big of an issue. It's definitely not for me now. My internet for my internal stuff, my fiber, which never goes down, goes down more, right? Which it hardly ever does, right?

16:06Goes on more than actually my platform does now. There could be a little hiccup here or there, but from an actual outage being down, don't get scared of that anymore. Especially when you're using that core group of companies. The other thing is too, is work from home has become extremely easy, right? So just make sure that most of your agents are gonna be work from home. You talk that through. That's not a big issue for me anymore. It is literally two or three clicks with most of these organizations, right? And you can be talking. Very minimal internet is needed, right? Three to five megs, right, for some of them. Obviously it's preferred that they're wired in, but I have a ton of reps that are using wireless. We even use wireless sometimes here, depending on where reps, because we have so much space now that if you want to come in and work in the office, I don't make you work like in call center booth C2, right?

16:58You can really go wherever you want and just kind of work from there. So sometimes they'll be plugged in, sometimes they're wireless. Obviously our internet here is really good. So again, just trying to think through any questions that I normally get. I think those are the big ticket items of when you're looking to purchase. Again, making sure that you understand what you're looking at, making sure that you have somebody that's with you that can take you to tell you the things that you don't understand or you don't know, Making sure that you put every possible thing you can, right? Into that scope, right? From getting your dream, right? And maybe the dream can't come true totally, but it's going to be way better. So don't just think I got to stay where I'm at. Think way ahead and what you need and add that stuff in and see what it is.

17:45And a lot, most of the time it's native to the platform. You're not paying for it anymore. You just didn't know. Big example of this is virtual callbacks, right? So many people that have never had a, had a Seacast platform or been on the cloud, wonder, hey, can I get that virtual callback thing where people, how much does that cost? And for pretty much everybody, it's just, it's a small scripting thing that is native to the platform, right? It doesn't cost you anything more. And a lot of people think it does. That's one small example of a ton of things to kind of make sure that you're looking out for. But again, I hope this helps you guys as a lot of you I know are on this journey, you know, third, fourth quarter here, looking for something for next year. If there's any way that I can help, please let me know.

18:27I mean, even if you're using another partner, just want another set of eyes, more than happy to help. So that's kind of what I got for you guys this week. Again, thank you so much for, there's been so much that we've done and so many different questions that are now coming in. I think, you know, next week we may do another just AMA with a bunch of the questions that have come in. So thank you for the feedback. The other thing is we've blown, I don't wanna say blown up, but for us, for me, We've been doing a lot of posting on TikTok and getting a lot of conversation back and forth. So it's just at call center underscore geek. That's me on TikTok, ton of conversations, ton of back and forth. A lot of people like yelling and swearing at me on, they don't believe that we can do four chats in a session that I'm ruining the whole customer service world.

19:15I said a max of four. So just some really cool stuff like that. I respond to everything with video. So again, if you have any questions on there, hit me up on TikTok and we can have some fun there too. But again, I hope this is helpful and I'll talk to you guys next week.