Who fixes it when it breaks? I would assume that the pre-assembled BBQ would come with some kind of warranty or Service Level Agreement (SLA) that guaranteed that they had assembled it correctly.
Who guarantees a homegrown contact center that was built by the disgruntled developer in the back office or the 3rd party partner you had to hire?
Can you imagine the finger pointing that will occur when something breaks?“I didn’t build this section of the code, that was Eddy who left 6 months ago.”, said the developer trying to figure out why an integration broke when the IT department pushed new code.
When I was a kid I used to love to break-out my old-school box of Legos and build houses, cars, trailers, spaceships and anything else I could imagine. Now the possibilities seem endless with the wide array of Lego pieces that are available today.That desire to build from scratch must have carried over to my adult life, because when I was in the market to buy and new BBQ grill, I chose the “some assembly required” approach. Here’s how it all went down…I had my previous grill for over 10 years and it finally gave up the ghost. After reading various reviews online and deciding on the grill that would fit our needs within our budget, we made the short journey to The Home Depot and made the purchase. Instead of buying one of the pre-assembled ones they had on display at the front of the store, we decided to grab one off the shelf that was still in the box (not entirely sure why), but how bad could it be (i.e. ‘some assembly required’)?Once we got it home and opened the box, I realized what I would be doing with the rest of my Saturday afternoon.As the pieces and parts to the BBQ were spread out in various places on the deck, it made me think of contact center software (weird I know, but an occupational hazard) and the notion of building your own call center software from scratch vs. buying something that has already been put together by those with experience and expertise in the space.What are some of the main differences between building vs. buying the best contact center software? Here are a few main differences I came up with (or see for yourself by click here to see a 20-minute demo of NICE CXone platform):
Speed to deploy
If I had purchased the pre-assembled BBQ, I would have been able to start cooking hamburgers that night, rather than spending the time wondering why I needed a new BBQ in the first place. While I still would have had to do a few minor things to setup the pre-assembled BBQ, the time and effort involved would have been much, much less.
Call center software is not easy. There are tons of little pieces and parts and lots of ways to build it today. For contact center software consider this…
Think about what is involved to ensure that a call is routed to the correct agent, or an application that tells me how many agents I should staff at a certain time of the day/week, and call recording software to monitor those agents to ensure compliance.
Imagine asking a handful of developers to understand the intricacies of creating an accurate forecasting tool (WFM) that accounts for voice and digital channels.
Now bring all of those different contact center software pieces into one unified call center application for your agents, supervisors and admins.
There are a handful of “pay only for what you use” pitches out there that makes the ‘build your own’ model appear cheaper, but as they say, ”the devil is in the details”.
How much money is lost in opportunity costs by allocating precious IT resources to build something your IT guys know little about?
What about the additional 3rd party products (or AWS products in the case of Amazon Connect) that you’ll need to bolt on (and pay for) to make it work? Think about things like the auto dialer, workforce management, call recording, IVR and ACD systems, AI, call tracking metrics, and more…). You either need to build each of those or integrate with something someone else has already built specifically for call center software. Just like my BBQ example, even if I had to pay a little extra for the pre-assembled version, I would have saved myself an afternoon of frustration and time I could have spent doing something else.
