I am designing a next generation contact center strategy for my organization and have been evaluating different products and options to uniquely meet customer needs. What would form the best of breed technology stack addressing next generation contact center requirements?
I have been looking at the following tools (both in Silo & as a set): Vocalcom, RightNow, inContact, Salesforce, SAP CRM, Suger CRM, along with the possibility of investing in building a custom application.
What has been your experience with these tools?
Many Thanks for giving your perspective.
Pratyush
Hello Pratyush.
Now that you are 1.5 years out from this post, just wondered how the project is working for you. Sounded like you were leaning towards Salesforce with custom development. Is that where you ended up? Are you meeting your goals?
Looking forward to your reply.
Steve
I am not sure if it can handle 30000 agents , But it sure seems full of all the required features www.ameyo.com
Steve - My clients run contact center for a 30000 seat and is looking for multi-channel Outbound & inbound capabilities along with an ability to have productivity tool set for Agent & Supervisor. 2nd phase of requirement is towards intelligent dash-boarding ,predictive analytic and Speech analytic...I am building a vision of converting current CC from basic contact center to smarter contact center...
Thank you so very much..
Pratyush
Thanks everyone for your response. I am consulting for a company that has been in the contact center business for over 30 + years and have great understanding about contact center process, its evolution and different tools in the market. That is one of the rational for thinking to build a Holistic Contact center product as we have not been able to find a single tool that meets at least 80% of the clients requirement..
Here is what we are tending towards...
1) Siebel is Out because of Cost , deployment & usability criteria.
2) RIghtnow is Out as I found Oracle doesn't seems to have focused strategy for rIght now. Demo experience was not very positive..
3) I think we are positively towards Salesforce + Custom build app that would meet at least 80% of our clients need...
Stay Great
Pratyush
I was interested to read your post, because I am just wrapping up a similar project. I have first hand experience with RightNow, Salesforce, and SAP CRM. I have not used SugarCRM, but I am very familiar with one of their partners, Zendesk.
I agree with Steve above, that a custom application is a difficult route to take, unless you'd be building it on an existing platform like Salesforce. I used SAP CRM in the 2004-2010 timeframe, and I would only recommend considering it if your company is already an SAP house. It is fully featured but not flexible. I was with a company that used RightNow from 2010-2012. It's a good system, but my experience with them was not very positive. I felt that after they were acquired by Oracle they became unresponsive to our needs. Perhaps they have put this behind them, I don't know. I am using Zendesk now, and regret the decision. We selected them because they were a preferred vendor to one of our partners. Zendesk has some innovative features, but I find the API troublesome and the system is not very flexible. It seems inexpensive, but to get some of the really important features you have to use their enterprise version, which is 5x per seat compared to the entry version.
I have had a lot of experience with Salesforce, and really like it. Salesforce is a solid, flexible, well-supported tool.
I'd be very happy to discuss this further. Feel free to reach out to me.
Pratyush.
Without knowing much about your requirements/needs, I would not recommend building your own custom app. Each one of these tools is good at what they do. I would find it hard to believe that you have many use cases that would fall outside of what these tools can deliver.
Custom development is usually a gamble. And no matter how well you define your requirements, you will likely have some ill-defined requirements that will lead to development and design that performs below what the off-the-shelf software provides.
Without knowing your requirements, I cannot recommend one over another.
Best of luck.
Steve
Hey Pratyush
You should check out Eventus Solutions Group www.eventusg.com
They're one of the best at determining the right contact center applciations
Hi,
Saleforce.com is hands down the best deployment option, for a number of
reasons:
1. Built from the ground up in the cloud. No legacy tech, no old code.
2. Built for 'the age of context' - mobile, social, geo, big data and
sensors
3. Their custom app system is second to none. Easy to use development and
deployment tools and easy integration with legacy systems. When I say
'easy', I mean built for speed and intuitive.
The other systems you've mentioned are either silo systems - stand alone or
are client-server (i.e. legacy at this point) and don't have a fresh,
straight-from-the-cloud approach.
I'd be happy to talk more about this if you'd like. I can be reached at
416.564.1232.
Cheers and good luck!
Jeff
Hi,
I can only really comment on Oracle Siebel, interesting why it isn’t on your list?
Regards
Simon Collins