Back to Basics: Optimizing a Contact Center Deployment

It’s no surprise that a lot of organizations choose to tackle contact center deployments on their own. Armed with services like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, they figure they have everything they could possibly need to quickly handle the necessary integrations and configurations.

For some, it’s an approach that works — they launch and run their contact centers without a hitch. But others eventually revisit their decision and wonder if maybe they should have done it differently. They wish their technologies were less complex but also more functional. Many struggle with stubborn data silos that prevent their agents from operating efficiently, while others would like to see their systems make better use of AI tools and analytics.

So how can organizations avoid deployment failures and ensure their contact centers are optimized from the start? Based on the work we’ve done in this space, here are a few ideas.

Before you do anything else, it’s important to have a thorough understanding of your organization’s customer experience pain points. What are you hoping to achieve with your new contact center technology, and how will it fit with your existing CX workflows?

With a discovery-first approach, you’ll put your business front and center in the decision-making process. Start with the problems that are most important for your organization to solve, and from there you can look for a purpose-built solution designed for the job you need it to do.

The good news is, no matter your goals, you’ll have multiple options from which to choose. The world of contact center technology is expanding by the day, and even the most established platforms are always evolving with new features and capabilities.

Zoom, RingCentral, Five9, Amazon Connect — we work with all of them and more, and we’re familiar with what makes each solution unique. Connect could easily be your best bet if you’re running business workloads on Amazon Web Services, while organizations embedded in the Cisco ecosystem may find Webex to be a better match. Ensure the solution is easy to scale as your business and contact center operations grow, and consider the licensing requirements of any technology — per use, per seat, pay as you go or concurrent agent model, for example — to maximize your ROI.

Because contact center deployments almost always move fast and are technically complex, there’s little room for error when it comes to their setup and launch. Forgetting to update important workflows could force customers into frustrating self-service loops, for example, while a simple integration gap could leave agents and their supervisors with dashboards lacking critical information. Organizations that attempt self-deployment by learning the process as they go often discover that the effort isn’t worth the additional time and risk.

At CDW, our engagement model for contact center deployments is straightforward: You help us understand your business, and we’ll come back with the technology you need to hit your customer service goals. You don’t have to choose between deploying quickly or deploying successfully. Instead, with the right partner, you can do both.