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Should you buy contact center services in a UC bundle?
Is an integrated contact center with UC right for your organization? UC expert Jon Arnold explains how to compare stand-alone and bundled contact center services.
Organizations can deploy contact center services as part of their unified communications environment or as a stand-alone service from a dedicated contact center vendor. UC vendors are certainly motivated to sell deeper into their customer base. And, with today's technology, unified communications and contact centers can be integrated.
While bundling the two platforms into one can offer some operational efficiencies, enterprises need to consider other factors, as well.
Contact centers have long operated independently. If your organization normally works in silos, then integrated contact center services and UC won't be a welcome development. Conversely, if your organization has embraced a customer-centric culture, the rationale for integration will be stronger, especially around the need for better communication across the enterprise to support customers.
On a more practical level, you must consider the current state of your systems for contact center services and telephony. If the systems are fairly new and pricey, the case for integration will be hard to make. However, if your systems are aging or showing shortcomings, you might want to modernize your technology and support customers in a more integrated way.
Purpose-built contact center services are highly evolved and provide rich capabilities to deliver strong customer experiences. Most UC vendors do not have this native expertise and just recently entered the contact center market through third-party partnerships or acquisitions. As such, their track record will be shorter. Depending on the kind of customer experience you plan to deliver, these bundled offerings should be carefully considered against your current contact center vendor.
It's also important to recognize that established contact center vendors have proprietary systems that have evolved over decades. They have been refined to perform at the highest levels. These products offer a deep ecosystem of technical support, developers, partners, and research and development.
Do you have a question for Jon Arnold or any other experts? Ask your enterprise-specific questions today! (All questions are treated anonymously.)
