When people discuss their assets or their intellectual property of their business they tend to gravitate towards the tangible. The products, the furniture, the people, the bricks and mortar, as well as the technologies they invest in. And that’s to be expected; It’s visible and easy to calculate value for.
I have been around contact centers and UC solutions for many years and I am surprised how many people still see them as a simple commodity; something that is a means to an end rather than something that can create tangible value to the business. For example. Many companies see their contact centre solution as way to simply take orders, or satisfy client needs etc. They haven’t yet understood that it could be a force for creating great value.
Others, once purchasing a new solution, will spend a lot of time at the start of a purchase designing how they want to handle different services and requirements, etc… and then never look at it again. I kid you not. I have seen call routing designs that have remained static for some ten years or more. This isn’t an achievement of good design (although it might have been good at the time it was written), but an indication of neglect and a lack of awareness of how much more value you can gain from your configuration assets.
Yes, that is correct. Your actual configuration of your unified communications solution as well as your multi-channel contact centre is an asset, and it’s more valuable than you realize. The method by which you configure your UC and CC technology has been a pain-staking expression, in code, of how you want to create your customer experience. It is unique. it is special. It is the way you want to be seen in the world. It is, at a macro level, how you talk, how you respond, how you care, and how you service. It needs to be protected, nurtured, evolved and, like any asset, valued. It is never been more important to recognize this than now.
The industry we are in is undergoing a huge amount of flux. Stalwarts in our space are under threat from the quick moving cloud-based services, who can offer features and capabilities that once were USPs to the major players. The rapid acceleration of computing power and reliable network bandwidth is transforming, and emptying, data centers. It is fundamentally changing the definition of resiliency and disaster recovery. AI systems are becoming more intuitive and self-learning. The means by which businesses can differentiate themselves through voice, web, apps and interactions is expanding, to the point a brand’s “look and feel” occur the instant the phone is answered, or customer opens a web-chat. All of this “look and feel” boils down to the configuration and design that your solutions support. Why wouldn’t you want to make sure this is secure, captured, tracked and, eventually, even transportable?
The market my company is in sits squarely in the middle of the UC and CC revolution (make no mistake about it, a revolution is happening all around you right now). When a colleague walked through a recent UC/CC event in Florida, he couldn’t believe the number of smaller players vying to take chunks out of the big three solutions. And they’re succeeding; stripping more and more market share every month. Your responsibility is to recognize the value of your configuration and design. Then seek out solutions, like ours, that can encapsulate that configuration for you; giving you an independent record of what your configuration is, at any point in time. And then, when you’re business is ready, the process by which you want to move to the “cloud” or to another service altogether, is that more protected, that more simpler, that more safe, and that little more faster, than if you had no solution to help.