If making a career-defining vendor selection was as easy as picking a name from a box, selecting a cloud vendor for your contact center would be an easy task. However, anyone who has undertaken a cloud migration to a Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) environment will tell you that it is not and should not be approached with the expectation that it is easy.
The problem with magic grids published once a year is that they are opinions masquerading as fact. Gartner's Magic Quadrant (MQ) is a series of market research reports that relies on proprietary qualitative data analysis to illustrate market trends, direction, maturity, and a comparison of qualifying market vendors.
Updated every year, MQs include a visual snapshot that plots vendors into a two-dimensional matrix based on their vision and execution completeness. Each evaluated vendor is placed into one of four quadrants: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, and Niche Players.
The top right of Gartner's MQ is most desirable — that coveted position of market dominance. How MQ arrives at who makes the top right position is a complete mystery and is often answered in a tone that mirrors Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz. In other words, "Don't look behind the curtain."
Legacy reliance on the MQ by IT
The term "Magic Quadrant" was first used in public by Gartner in 1994, but its history goes back to the 1980s when it was meant as a quick overview of a market segment. The Magic Quadrant had its inception at research meetings conducted by Gideon Gartner when Gartner Group was still small enough for most of the analysts to fit in one room at 50 Topgallant Road in Stamford, Connecticut.
Since 1994 and the advent of the internet, managers of Information Technology have used the MQ to determine which fast-arriving technologies were best for their organizations without having to do a great deal of research. It was also a great way to look smart in a meeting with business peers, which is a trademark need for most IT managers. But Information Technology is rarely the key stakeholder for the contact center's needs. Applying their legacy reliance methods for selecting a contact center cloud vendor is a recipe for a tremendous amount of finger-pointing post-selection.
Every Contact Center is unique, so are the technologies that support them
The business of a call center, regardless of the organization it supports (whether a bank or a non-profit), is a mix of human empathy and the efficient transmission of information. Both need to work in tandem, regardless of the omnichannel route that it may take.
Also, the factors that make selecting the right CCaaS vendor for your contact center a successful one is not just based on the specific customer experience or the agent experience alone. It must take factors like Reporting, CRM integration, WorkForce Management (WFM), Knowledge Management, unique Omnichannel approaches, and all supporting business goals from Finance, Human Resources, Marketing, and Sales or Support.
MQ's would have you believe that all the above, for you and your agents, customers, and business goals, can be easily determined by their, well, they never really tell you how they pick. Because it's magic. Also, it's widely understood that the report is catered towards investors over end-users.
Figures vs. FACTs
Cloudlinx, a best practice leader focused on helping US-based contact centers select and migrate to the cloud, did a recent review of 19 call centers that issued an RFP in 2021 and then selected a cloud vendor. The RFP was proprietary and specialized for small to midsized contact centers that had between 25 to 300 agents with over 380 qualifying questions.
The initial result when all qualified cloud vendors responded to the RFP was that the top MQ LEADER won the RFP based on their ability to answer the qualification questions.
Here is the surprise- After reviewing all 20 bids, the MQ Leader only won TEN PERCENT of the opportunities
Reason being? When the agents had to demo all the winning features and apply them to their real-life job of supporting customers, patients and users alike, the results told a different story than what the RFP said, along with Gartner's Magic Quadrant. Often, it was a niche cloud provider that could fulfill the goal of supporting all of the contact center's goals and not just the technology.
If your contact center is considering a migration to a cloud-based environment, and you are tasked with making a significant jump in both technology as well as how you will support your organization's customer experience, do your team a service and do not rely on a "Magic" report who's methodologies are as unknown as the people who write them.
Take the time to work with your agents, customers, and peers from the top of the organization to the bottom, as they all have a hand and an expectation of what this technology leap will do for them. The more you include your customer's and peers' voices in this buying decision, the fewer fingers will be pointed after they go live.
Because as big as the Magic Quadrant might be, it's not big enough to hide behind.