Don’t Put Your Cloud Contact Center Implementation on Hold

Building a Contact Center Implementation Strategy

It’s hard not to smile when a sales rep claims their company’s “open APIs” will allow you to set up your contact center in no time, but that can quickly turn into a grimace six months later when you find yourself buried in hidden professional service fees and still without a functional contact center. While many vendors, especially legacy providers, claim their new and improved APIs will solve all of the implementation and integration woes, in reality it often costs a considerably larger amount of time and engineering dollars before you come close to ready for implementation.

Switching contact center providers always comes with the understood cost of a transition period – you’ll lose a little uptime time while you make the move – but ultimately the new capabilities should make up for it. You plan for a short-term period of incurring the switching cost, then a long-term reaping of the benefits. However, if those benefits dwindle too long while you wait for your contact center to implement, by the time you can actually use those exciting new features, your customers and employees alike are frustrated.

That delayed implementation is a double-edged sword, because a longer-than-expected transition means greater-than-expected costs. When you consider that today’s contact centers are best utilized when they are intelligently integrated with multiple other solutions, this transitional downtime could mean that several companies are waiting for as long as eight months after a deal is signed before seeing any actual value.

Changing the Implementation Paradigm

It’s time that business leaders stop accepting this inconvenience and begin challenging the status quo that has allowed legacy contact center vendors to get away with months-long implementations. With cloud-native solutions, enterprise customers should expect to implement fully operational contact centers two to four weeks after they sign.

Second-generation cloud solutions allow businesses to implement new customers’ contact centers at a lightning-fast speed because cloud contact center infrastructures are configurable at the click of a button, without any code. Setup, management and administrative tasks such as designing an IVR, creating an automation or adding an agent are fast and easy, requiring little to no additional professional services costs.

At Talkdesk, that’s what we offer customers. We are able to implement new customers’ contact centers at a lightning-fast speed because our cloud contact center infrastructure is configurable at the click of a button, without any code. Setup, management and administrative tasks such as designing an IVR, creating an automation or adding an agent are fast and easy, requiring zero additional professional services costs. Our simple “clicks, not code” backend has enabled some customers to set up a call center as quickly as a single day.

Save Time With Seamless 3rd-Party Integrations

Talkdesk also saves customers time during implementation by providing 30 out-of-the-box integrations with major CRMs and business tools like Salesforce, Zendesk and Microsoft Dynamics. From the second you set up your contact center, all administrative actions in Talkdesk can be completed in just seconds using our administrative backend. The system is designed to put power in the hands of our customers and enable them to fine tune their contact center as their needs change. Talkdesk’s intuitive management dashboard offers total control of the contact center and requires no training or certification to master.

Additionally, we created the first enterprise contact center app store, AppConnect, to unite our best-in-breed software with innovative new solutions that can redefine the way businesses build their contact center stack. All the apps come with one-click integrations and 30-day free trials, meaning customers can experiment and start seeing value the day they decide to test out a new solution, without any risk or cost. To make it even easier, all the billing is handled monthly on a single Talkdesk bill rather than externally through the individual vendors.

We liken our AppConnect platform to the app stores offered by Apple and Google. Only a small percentage of apps on their platforms are actually created by in-house developers – the main value is that the platform makes it easy for other developers to create and integrate their ideas. Our AppConnect partners use our tools to build next-generation contact center offerings that come pre-integrated with the Talkdesk platform, meaning there are no hidden integration nightmares like long wait times or professional services costs.

It’s time to stop accepting implementation horror stories and start improving your customer experiences with highly-personalized contact center interactions. It’ll be more beneficial to your company’s bottom line and better yet, it’ll make your customers happier and more loyal.