5 mistakes to avoid when choosing a CX provider

1.    Unrealistic AI expectations

Every vendor has an AI story now, and every contact center is racing to deploy AI. When both supply and demand are driving the market, CX leaders must be careful not to set the AI bar too high. AI enthusiasts may make lofty promises that AI will solve all CX issues. To avoid this trap, the buyer must set the agenda.

Buyers should develop a clear set of use cases where AI can address specific contact center challenges, rather than letting the vendor dictate how a general approach to AI will cover everything. Aside from having well-defined business objectives for AI, CX leaders must also recognize that these are not out-of-the-box services.

AI technologies are highly iterative, meaning they improve and learn the more they are used. This requires a more patient approach, where AI will make mistakes along the way, but as those missteps are addressed, trust will grow, and with that, confidence in using AI for more complex tasks.

2.    Assuming vendors have industry expertise

All CX vendors have enough technology expertise to help contact centers modernize, but CX leaders still need to do rigorous evaluating to determine which vendors are the best fit. That requires technical competency, either done internally, or with qualified consultants.

While this assessment is necessary, buyers still need to determine the best fit based on industry expertise. For different types of businesses, every vertical market has specific needs and challenges, and vendors must show how their technology addresses these issues. This is especially true within a vertical, where sub-sectors have even more specific needs. For example, consider financial services, which has regulatory and compliance requirements for all businesses. Then, consider different types, such as credit unions, which have different customer personas than a mainstream bank.

This is the level CX leaders must evaluate vendors on. And the same applies for other vectors, such as business size -- SMB or enterprise -- or by region, like U.S., EU, Asia-Pacific and so on. Each variable has specific CX implications. Regardless of how good the technology is, buyers cannot assume that all CX vendors can meet their business-level needs.

3.    Product will scale beyond pilot phase

In cases where there's an urgency from senior management to deploy AI, this can be easy for CX leaders to overlook. This is a common scenario, where getting short-term results is the driver, rather than taking a more strategic approach to AI.

For the contact center in particular, this is likely to take the form of automation improvements on conventional metrics such as average hold time or containment rates. Pilot tests can demonstrate this fairly easily, but that's not an indication of how AI will scale across the entire operation or customer base.

Scalability is mainly determined by technology capabilities, and this will vary by vendor. Some vendors focus on small-scale operations, but many are more up-market, and in those cases, CX leaders need vendors to demonstrate how their platform will scale for the specific environment.

One way is getting customer references from similar scenarios as proof points when their deployment was scaled up. Another is to use AI with your data to simulate how the platform would perform at scale. Either way, CX leaders cannot assume services will scale linearly from pilot testing.

4.    Seamless integration with existing systems

This is related to the prior issue, but warrants its own caution. A key talking point for CX vendors is their integrations with other vendors, along with how their partner ecosystem will support ongoing innovation. All contact centers need this for modernizing operations and to support the needs of today's digital, AI-savvy customers.

With many contact centers still based on legacy, premises-based systems, this capability will be critical, even if just migrating to the cloud without including AI. A key reason why contact centers remain premises-based is the complexity of customized integrations that have evolved over many years. Undoing this poses unknown technology risks and can be a major deterrent for adopting cloud-based technology.

Most CX leaders recognize there is even greater risk in standing still, and to manage that, they need to choose the right vendor who can migrate them along the cloud path. Since every contact center has a unique set of internal integrations and configurations -- such as CRM, BSS and CMS -- they need to carefully assess how well CX vendors will interwork for all of these.

5.    Vendor is not talking to all stakeholders

Addressing today's CX needs is more complex than how contact centers have addressed conventional needs for customer service. The key change with having a CX focus is the notion that customer interactions with the contact center do not fully define today's view of customer service. This is a more holistic view where interactions across the entire organization define CX, not just what happens in the contact center.

By extension, decisions about CX providers must reflect that, and should not be based solely on the needs of the contact center. If that is your current thinking for contact center modernization, CX vendors need to be aligned this way. This means they need to understand the full range of stakeholders in your organization who will be affected by CX buying decisions.

CX leaders should not assume vendors will have that knowledge, nor assume they will in fact engage with all of them to get a complete picture for what's needed. In either case, it is incumbent on CX leaders to address this at the outset with prospective vendor partners, and not to simply take their word for it.

Jon Arnold is principal of J Arnold & Associates, an independent analyst providing thought leadership and go-to-market counsel with a focus on the business-level effect of communications technology on digital transformation.