Gaining Advantage in the Contact Centre Market

A Dive into the Reseller/MSP Landscape Reveals Only 2.5% Identify as Contact Centre Providers in Recent Survey

Selling contact centres as a service, particularly across informal contact centres, is challenging since not only do end customer requirements vary considerably, but CCaaS solutions are made up of multiple components often requiring engagement with multiple vendors. Resourcing and understanding the opportunity is a big commitment due to this complexity, so it’s unsurprising that only 2.5 per cent of providers defined it as their main occupation.

Bridging the Gap Between CCaaS Providers and Channel Companies through Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing

Knowledge sharing is vital in this evolving market. Channel companies need to develop close working relationships with their CCaaS providers to ensure they understand each element of an application and can incorporate the product messaging to effectively sell a solution.

Likewise, CCaaS providers require input from the channel in terms of where they are having the most success, what the customer profiles look like, and the benefits being gained. This requires the channel to be less protective of their customer case studies so that providers can understand where they fit into the grand scheme of a solution.

These strong relationships are also critical as CCaaS requires a number of capabilities and components, with multiple vendors delivering different parts of a solution. It is therefore unlikely a channel provider will find one vendor to deliver every component.  The channel are the ones that bring it all together with creativity and inspiration, and it is the provider who can deliver real value to customers.

Having a level of trust, a shared vision and a shared understanding of what is needed will help both parties achieve their objectives. In addition, sharing knowledge and enabling information to flow going back and forth will stimulate new creative ways to use the technology.

For example, a CCaaS service designed for a pizza delivery service included our live wallboard display with information from its CRM, alongside details on each caller’s location. The display also included a weather application to help manage staff numbers and travel times. By overlaying data from multiple sources and providers, the pizza firm can more accurately predict what the day is going to look like and can set precise expectations on staffing and service levels. This is a use case of a CCaaS solution delivered by a provider that needed to work closely with its partners to both gain competitive advantage and meet customer expectations.

Future Growth in Contact Centers: Identifying potential

There is a huge untapped market around informal contact centres where an organisation receives inbound customer calls across multiple departments and calls are transferred from customer-facing teams to other departments.  Channel providers have an opportunity to combine UCaaS and CCaaS solutions together and differentiate their services by helping these customers to understand how customer-facing teams are performing across the business in order to improve overall customer experience.

With the growth in Microsoft Teams, the informal contact centre becomes increasingly relevant since organisations no longer need sophisticated tools to improve the management of their customer-facing teams.  Options are now accessible to every size of organisation, even the smallest enterprise.

In addition, the consolidation of the technologies where users are mixing desktop phone systems with Microsoft Phone capabilities means there is an opportunity to bring clarity to customer service levels with analytics and insights across these different technologies.

The Impact of Analytics and AI on the Future – A Progress Report

Analytics has been important in the contact centre space for many years delivering powerful business insights to the right people at the right time. Tollring’s focus has been to take core features available in large and complex call centre solutions and make them accessible to smaller teams, thus widening the addressable market for our channel partners. The addition of AI now makes this data more accessible, more useful and even more insightful.

Analytics and AI vendors like Tollring, are seeking ways to make the technology far more accessible to many more customers. We can already show that AI-based analytics such as in call recording can have a substantial impact and whilst it is still early days, the progress of AI over the year ahead will be significant.

AI will also have a big impact across the large contact centre market which is still predominantly on-premise and heavily bespoke.  The shift away from these tried and tested solutions will be difficult and many are still committed to their existing legacy services. As a result, they are missing out on lots of capabilities that are already out-of-the-box and exist today.  It is going to be a major game-changer in the market and the growth in AI technologies will force people to reconsider their contact centre strategies.

Key Strategies for Reseller/MSP Leaders in the Contact Centre Market

The key to gaining a competitive advantage is to ensure a reseller is aligned with their CCaaS providers, are willing to share knowledge and keep up with the technologies.  Most importantly, the channel provider needs to have both the skills and the willingness to focus on this market.

A CCaaS solution must also be delivered in a streamlined way particularly when part of an overall solution.  This requires a solution that can be delivered seamlessly, and be replicable, without it becoming a massive undertaking every time whilst also being easy for both the channel provider and customer to unlock features and capabilities in an automated way.

Channel providers will succeed by identifying their target audience, understanding their needs and then cookie cutting the service as much as possible for a particular vertical or market segment, otherwise it will be too complex to integrate with multiple different systems. The provider can then specialise and become expert in a flavour of CCaaS together with a strong upsell story that will enable their customers to evolve and enhance the technology that has been deployed.

Insights from the Survey Reveal Varied Perspectives on Growth Avenues in Markets and Technology within the Reseller/MSP Landscape. 

There is little consensus on where future growth will come from because channel providers are all at different stages in their Cloud and AI strategies. In addition, CCaaS applications are now more adaptable and can be applied across multiple verticals, geographies, and size of organisations leaving little consensus on where growth will be found.

There’s also a level of education still needed. Whilst AI is the current buzzword, many people are not clear on what it really means in the context of their businesses or what it can deliver.  This lack of knowledge also generates an element of fear, especially where data compliance, security and GDPR are concerned.

Areas that will generate growth will revolve around Microsoft, as more organisations consolidate their communications, move to Microsoft Phone and leverage AI-based technologies that can deliver greater flexibility and personalisation with services delivered cost-effectively and at scale.

Not least, call recording has always been important in contact centre environments. By leveraging the power of AI, Tollring’s new Record AI will help organisations to review the calls that matter and analyse sentiment at scale to generate new business for the channel.