Companies are constantly under pressure to cut costs, and that can lead to decisions that end up doing lasting damage. The drive to reduce operating costs becomes much stronger during tough economic times, but a Wharton Business School Report makes the case that having to report quarterly earnings drives companies into “non-strategic cost-cutting” even at the best of times.1
CIOs are often on the receiving end of this push to cut expenditures. Many organizations see their IT department and contact center as cost centers. They are critical to success, sure, but they are expensive and, therefore, ripe for cost-cutting. Because of the pressure to deliver savings, there’s a danger that when a contract for an existing service comes up for renewal and a discount is offered, the CIO will sign on for another two or three years just to get quick and easy cost-savings. However, by doing so, they’ve just locked the company into an outdated platform—one that lacks the flexibility, agility, and deep feature set of a modern cloud-based call center solution.
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Keeping the status quo for a little less money satisfies the board and shareholders for a quarter, but it is definitely a “non-strategic” move.
Cloud services are an increasingly popular route to IT and contact center cost savings. Reports like Gartner’s 2019 projection that the cloud services market is on track to be worth over $266 billion in 2020 are widely read by the C-Suite.2 The Gartner report also includes summaries that further whip up expectations:
“Adoption of next-generation solutions are almost always ‘cloud enhanced’ solutions, meaning they build on the strengths of a cloud platform to deliver digital business capabilities.”
Reports like this bring Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) to the attention of the C-Suite, which is a good thing. However, they can raise expectations and put pressure on the CIO to migrate legacy customer contact center technology to create cloud-based call centers. The reality is many organizations lack the in-house expertise to properly evaluate managed, cloud-based solutions.
There are hundreds of vendors out there, and while many products may look similar on the surface, at a deeper level, there can be huge differences. Choosing the wrong CCaaS solution—because you’re under pressure to cut costs and the cloud promises to deliver substantial competitive advantages—can end in disaster.
Making the wrong choice can backfire to the extent that the new solution ends up being less capable than the legacy system it replaced. By the time it’s patched together into some semblance of functioning (often with the help of expensive third-party integrators), the expected cost savings have evaporated as well.
That raises the question of how to avoid falling into the trap of making a fast, poorly informed choice.
The solution many organizations have chosen is to bring in a trusted advisor. At ACLIVITI, we have worked with many medium and large-sized companies, guiding them through successful transitions from legacy IT systems to a cloud-based call center. The ACLIVITI team has extensive experience and knows the vendors. We know the hard questions, and know how to ask them to narrow down vendor choices. With ACLIVITI as a trusted advisor, a CIO can ensure the right vendor and platform are chosen, and also get help with implementation.
The result is the flexibility, agility, and enhanced capabilities that a cloud-based call center platform promises, along with the savings that were a driving factor. Partner with ACLIVITI to ensure that cost-cutting is a strategic move, not just reactionary.
1. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/ending-quarterly-reporting/
2. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-11-13-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-public-cloud-revenue-to-grow-17-percent-in-2020
