How to choose a CX provider: A practical buyer's guide

Technical buying factors

These factors involve the underlying technologies of a vendor's CX offering. Admittedly, this list is far from comprehensive. However, all these factors are critical indicators for how well the product performs as advertised and how well it performs in your environment and the existing contact center deployments. 

Given the complexity of today's CX offerings compared to legacy contact center technologies, some of these factors will be new considerations for decision-makers.

Proof of concept

Vendors should be willing to run a pilot to demonstrate their technology is market-ready. CX leaders will need more than reference customers or testimonials to vouch for the vendor, especially if your experience has only been with legacy contact center products. Organizations should look for proof-of-concept (PoC) scenarios that will affect CX, rather than testing a simple chatbot or workflow automation.

Also, you should run these PoC scenarios with your own customer data rather than the vendors simulating a situation with generic data drawn from their customer base.

Integrations

Legacy contact centers typically have highly customized integrations that may not easily accommodate new elements, which could limit adapting to CX technologies. Even if you're already using CCaaS and other cloud-based elements, integration capabilities with new vendors need to be assessed carefully. Integrations include contact center elements such as CRM or workforce management as well as elements that serve the broader organization, such as data warehouse or billing.

The vendor should have strong API capabilities to integrate with your tech.

With today's open architectures, API capabilities will be a key indicator for how well the vendor's elements can integrate with yours. Also, a bigger-picture consideration would be if you're looking to deploy both CCaaS and unified communications as a service, especially from different vendors.

Scalability

Most CX deployments start small, but you'll need to know how well the vendor can scale to support your entire customer base. Not all vendors scale equally, and you should look to see how well they have scaled with customers of similar size.

More specifically, scalability applies to several vectors, and addressing these will be a better proof point. Key examples would be scaling to support remote agents, multiple contact center locations, across the geographies of your customers, and the various languages spoken by your customers.

Omnichannel support

This can be easy to overlook, especially for legacy-based contact centers. While most inbound traffic is still voice-based, other channels are becoming more important, both for agent-based interactions and automated forms of self-service. Digital natives often prefer text-based modes, both for online chat and mobile messaging -- and even video. Social media is also growing, as many customers use these channels to bypass conventional options.

CX leaders need to map out a full profile of channel activity -- both for inbound and outbound communications -- and ensure prospective vendors can support them all.

Compliance

This is an extensive topic, as many verticals have specific requirements to meet, such as HIPAA for healthcare, along with horizontal requirements that span all sectors, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act and Payment Card Industry. Whatever applies to your business, you'll need to ensure vendors have current certifications, especially where AI is going to be used.

The vendor's AI should mitigate compliance risk and minimize false positives.

Also, as your CX deployment scales, AI will play a growing role in monitoring customer communications and flagging compliance issues. You'll need to determine how effectively the vendor's AI can mitigate risk and minimize false positives. This assessment should apply to the vendor's privacy and security features and how compliance is managed end to end. Examples would include non-compliance reporting, data retention capabilities and how they support data residency.

AI governance

Invariably, new CX deployments will include AI, and governance will be a key technical capability. This space may be a work in progress but could become the most important way for CX vendors to differentiate. CX buyers have little experience in developing policies and vendors are well-positioned to help based on best practices from their customer base.

Key areas to consider will be how vendors minimize various forms of bias in their models, being transparent to help end users understand how conclusions are reached and protecting privacy by not using personal data to train large language models.

Business-level buying factors

Technical factors are essential for evaluating CX vendors, but non-technical factors that address business operations are equally important -- both for the product that's offered and the vendor with which you're doing business. Again, this checklist is not comprehensive, but it provides a solid foundation for making buying decisions beyond the technical virtues of the offering.

Industry expertise

By nature, all CX vendors offer viable CX products, but effectiveness is not a given across all types of customers. This is especially true for cloud-native CCaaS providers, who are rooted in the software world, but not tied to any particular type of customer.

The selected vendor should have expertise in your vertical market and organization size.

Conversely, legacy-based vendors developed their technology early on, and have had time to establish niches in verticals or types of organizations. Expertise in your vertical market should be a key criterion, as well as expertise by organization size, whether it's an enterprise or SMB. Regionality could also be a consideration, and you'll find these capabilities vary widely by vendor.

Focus on outcomes

Promises of AI-driven efficiencies from automation are attractive at face value but are too generic to support a business case. The more specific the CX outcome, the better the vendor can demonstrate its understanding of your business. This is best shown by outlining use cases where the product can deliver tangible benefits that address your business challenges.

One example would be operational metrics that reflect contact center performance, such as shorter handle times, higher containment rates and improved script adherence. Other examples would be CX-focused, such as improved customer satisfaction, reduced escalation rates and improved retention among at-risk customers.

Roadmap alignment

Business strategy is a bigger-picture consideration that cannot be overlooked. Every business is on its own journey, both with AI overall and for modernizing to improve CX. In some cases, the incumbent vendor is the right choice across the entire journey, but if not, roadmap alignment will be critical in making the next change.

Leading-edge vendors will be the right choice when CX leaders are comfortable adopting new technologies, but less so when customers cannot adopt at the pace the vendor wants. To assess this, CX leaders need to understand the vendor's go-to-market roadmap and ensure it aligns with what the business is willing and able to do.

Addressing all stakeholders

Making good CX buying decisions requires input from a wide range of stakeholders

As contact centers evolve to focus on CX, the business must adopt a more holistic view of customer service. The contact center is just one touchpoint for CX, and the customer journey covers the entire historical relationship between a customer and the brand. Sales and marketing play a pivotal role now in shaping CX. Contact centers can no longer make technology decisions in isolation from the rest of the organization.

Making good CX buying decisions requires input from a wide range of stakeholders, and there should be alignment whereby the vendor can engage with all your stakeholders.

Pricing model

On a business level, this may be the least-understood factor. Legacy contact centers were largely hardware-based, where the buying criteria around total cost of ownership (TCO) and ROI were well-known. Today's SaaS offerings -- such as CCaaS -- are Opex-based and follow a seat-based pricing model. Aside from being open-ended, buyers will need to carefully look for hidden costs, such as tech support or a la carte extras.

Furthermore, with AI, there is a shift now to outcomes-based pricing, as well as a token-based pricing model, which can get expensive quickly. Conventional TCO and ROI metrics simply don't apply here, and CX buyers will need to get a clear understanding of all the cost inputs involved.

Vendor stability

No matter how good the technology is, the state of the vendor must be considered. Aside from transforming CX, AI is also transforming the vendor space, as these companies must invest heavily in the technology to be competitive. These costs are high, and being early days, the benefits are uncertain, which adds risk to vendor viability.

Financial stability should be a fundamental concern for CX buyers, and with the market evolving so quickly, you'll also need confidence that the vendor is a category leader. Key metrics to build that confidence in certain vendors include sales volume, revenue growth rate, market share, tenure of management team and rankings in industry scorecards from leading analyst firms.

Selecting a CX provider should be based on business goals, not just features.

When evaluating CX providers, enterprises large and small have different factors to consider. Just about every enterprise is different, so some organizations would prioritize certain buying factors over others. CX provider selection should be based on business goals, not just features. Vendor stability, support quality and industry experience matter as much as software capabilities.

Also, when selecting a CX partner, be sure you consider your own innovation roadmap and AI plans, which are hugely important for future-proofing your CX vendor choice.

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.