Do you want to customize a big part of the experience that your contact centers deliver? If you have a lot of inhouse developer resources, it may sound like a plan to build your own cloud contact center solution from scratch. But most companies don’t have that capacity available. And besides, it is no exception that it takes years to deploy. So, the question is: build or buy?
There is a big trend towards buy in the land of dialogue management. The most obvious reason is that building your own may take years. But in this age of agility, you can’t wait that long for results. So, many of today’s contact center solutions claim themselves to be off-the-shelf products. But how do you know if they are? In this blog we will help you distinguish plain building blocks from fully integrated platforms such as our Dialogue Cloud.
If you don’t build your own software, you’ll need to choose from what already exists. Software as a service (SaaS) has become a common way to ‘purchase’. You will typically access the software online and pay on a subscription or pay-as-you-go basis. For communication purposes there are several SaaS types:
There are numerous definitions of these cloud communications solutions. And Babilonion confusion is always lurking. But what’s in a name, really? The most important thing is that you focus on what you need. Not on what it’s called.
Are you looking for basic contact center functionality? That can be an excellent idea. However, do realize that it may lack flexibility towards future requirements. Rather want to integrate communication capabilities into your business applications? Great! But make sure to connect with your CRM to improve operations. Like I said: focus on what you need, not on the label. Ultimately, combining the abilities of UCaaS, CCaaS and CPaaS gives you the control over your business communications.
Many SaaS communications vendors sell their products as both flexible and off-the-shelf. Theoretically, that means you can build anything you want with any capabilities you have. But daily practice is a bit more complex. Usually these solutions are building block APIs. With no built-in user interfaces (UI), data integrations and orchestration between the different blocks. Even though these are crucial factors to ensure adoption, productivity and decent reporting.
Let me be frank. Buying building blocks solutions gets you the worst of both worlds. You don’t buy a ready product and you also don’t build your own. You will need to buy or design the interfaces for agents, supervisors and customers. And build all of the orchestration around transfers, recording, CRM integrations and more. It’s a patchwork, a quilt, a recipe for failure.
With Anywhere365® you can easily extend omnichannel capabilities to anyone in your business. Anywhere365® Dialogue Cloud is a true off-the-shelf dialogue management product for all of your heavy communicators, such as the contact center and internal helpdesks.
It is not just a collection of APIs or a packaged contact center SaaS product. Everything is knitted together in a managed environment and you’ll require zero extra development capacity. You’ll benefit from an easy and first time right deployment, and a flawless and intuitive agent and supervisor UI.
To make it even better, our zero code Dialogue Studio allows you to design dialogue flows by dragging and dropping nodes to a canvas. For most automations there are no development skills required. Dialogues through voice, chat, email, social media and many other channels are intelligently routed between AI assistants, human agents and even to subject matter experts beyond the contact center.
Want to see how our native Microsoft Teams Contact Center enables AI led self-service and human agents to deliver phenomenal customer experiences? Download our whitepaper here >