5 Common Mistakes That Lead To CCaaS False Starts or Poor Deployments

1. Not Phasing the Project Properly

You cannot go into a project without knowing what your realistic ability is to manage this change process. You must be cognizant of how much consumable change to you have the ability to absorb.  These factors are critical to deploying a contact center solution hat will have the desired impact for your clients but also for giving your team the ability to put their best foot forward and develop ways to utilize the new technology better.

Don’t fall into these common traps:

• Too much change, too soon
• Utilizing a new technology with old processes; take your time and do it right.
• Not knowing if your people are up to the task.
• Not having the data to create proper starting benchmarks.
• Not creating new or migrating your critical data properly to a manageable format.

2. Not engaging the geeks early enough

Too often a contact center manager will take on a project because it makes sense and is critical for the business without understanding how much is actually on the IT departments plate during that same window of time.  Do not think that. Because this is cloud, IT will not need to be engaged.  They only have a finite amount of resources and time to manage a new technology migration and a CCaaS platform will touch many of their areas and require careful planning.

• VoIP is not the same as Hosted VoIP.
• Security will be fine with sending these calls over the internet.
• Using dual screens for agents will have no real impact on your network.
• This project does not need careful integration with other programs.
• That everyone can operate on your schedule – or that of the vendor. 

3. Not Reading the Fine Print

Each contract that you sign is designed to be advantageous to the vendor in exchange for them providing quality services.  However, since your CCaaS project is going to be impactful to other departments and plans you may not be aware of if it important to understand each element of your commitments made both today and in the past.  Hindsight is great but expensive.

Be careful to diligently gather the following information:

• What contracts are in place for legacy technologies?
• How much actual training and PM time do you have with each element of the solution?
• When do charges start?
• When will a price increase be mandatory?
• Are their overlapping seat or integration costs that need to be understood?
• How much is storage actually going to cost you?

4. Not taking the time to manage your data well in advance.

It is a misconception that you have to begin the project of cleaning up your data once you have selected a vendor so they can tell you where to begin or what they will need from you.  You will be burning months of lead time and preparation time if you do this.  You do not want to fix processes once you go-live or leave yourself too little runway.

You have a golden opportunity to make the life of your agents simpler and more engaging by planning in advance what you want to show them and ensuring that data is relevant to them.  Services like, gamification, CRM tools, speech recognition and managing screen prompts are all enhanced when the needs of the agent is considered. Don’t build it from the “what does management want to see” perspective first.

5. Not knowing all of your entry points

This may sound simplistic but moving from a premises-based PBX that to a CCaaS platform if a complicated endeavor filled with integrations you may never have considered and may even be taking for granted will work the same way because someone in sales says, “no problem”.

Have you considered:

• Where your SME’s are that clients will need to speak with?
• How many transfers it will take to reach them?
• Does your phone system integration allow you to track the client journey properly?
• Remember: Your client journey is the key to your client’s happiness…it needs to be simple.
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