Building the Business Case for Contact Center Improvements

Even for the most obvious investments that drive improvements to your business; the process of building consensus, addressing cultural change and locking down an airtight business case can be troublesome even for the most seasoned business leader. 

There are numerous tools that all vendors will provide to help you build the business case in the form of whitepapers, infographics and ROI/TCO calculators, not to mention the sales team will take information to help build your solution.  During this critical assessment phase, its important to build support for the solution you are looking to deploy.  

At NiCE CXone, this of course is largely made up of enterprises and public sector agencies looking to move to a cloud contact center solution.  A few pointers:

• Know your existing issues.
  • What are the costs associated with your existing contact center solution?  What is your ability to achieve your internal SLA’s?  Most importantly, understand from your customers, what the experience of their journey is like.  Run a survey, conduct some interviews and identify weak spots across the customer journey that are impacting your overall customer sat scores.
• Know how those issues are impacting other groups across your organization.
  • If it’s a cost issue, what benefit does the IT team gain in moving to cloud?  Will it free budget up to focus on other initiatives?  Will it conflict with security policies?  If so, how are those navigated?  (Shameless plug:  NiCE CXone Cloud Contact Center is the industry’s first certified cloud contact center and Workforce Optimization provider)
• Ensure that the customer is always first in your business case.
  • More than likely you’re looking to drive an improvement there.  What impact does a lower than desired customer sat score mean for your organization.  Limited cross-sell/up-sell opportunities?  Weakened referenceable customer portfolio?  Increased calls back to the sales team that should be focused on new business?

Each of these three elements are critical to understand in building your business case.  It is more than financial; it is often a cultural shift.  Especially for organizations with rigid security standards (which of course most organizations have.)  Remember, that you must be aware that you don’t know what you don’t know.  In your vendor assessments listen to the vendor’s approach to a new way of doing things – it may conflict with how you do things today, but it could drive change for your organization as well. 

Throughout your due diligence with vendor assessments, listen for their focus and commitment to driving change to your customer/citizen journey and improving overall customer experience.  There are many sales teams that take a technology-first approach to selling.  “Let us show you our products!”  The vendors that are worth their salt are the ones that first take the time to understand your problems before considering a solution.  Hear from Jim Conner, Director of Operations as he shares his thoughts on building your business case.