Navigating the Technology Maze for Small Contact Centers: A Practical Guide

Welcome back to "Advice from a Call Center Geek," the podcast dedicated to enhancing your contact center operations! In today's episode, we dive into the often confusing world of technology for small contact centers. With the holiday season approaching and AI becoming a buzzword, we aim to clarify and simplify your tech choices.

Key Points Discussed:

Bridging Contact Center Operations and AI:
We explore how AI is shaping the industry, moving beyond the hype to practical applications, especially for smaller centers.

Technology for Small Contact Centers:
We focus on contact centers with under 100 seats, discussing how to select the right tools without getting overwhelmed by sales pitches for unnecessary tech.

Practical Advice:
We offer actionable insights on platforms suitable for different sizes of contact centers, from micro setups to those nearing 100 seats. This includes a detailed look at CCaaS and UCaaS platforms, and when each is appropriate.

Budget-Friendly Solutions:
We discuss cost-effective alternatives for quality
assurance, knowledge management, and other essential tools, emphasizing the use of AI and tools like ChatGPT to automate processes.

Hardware Recommendations: 
Practical tips on choosing computers, headsets, and operating systems that offer the best value for money.

This episode is not just about technology trends; it's about making informed decisions that truly benefit your contact center. Tune in for an insightful journey through the maze of contact center tech!

If you are looking for USA outsourced customer service or sales support, we here at Expivia would really like to help you support your customers.
Please check us out at expiviausa.com, or email us at info@expivia.net!

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:26

Welcome back everybody to another episode of advice from a call center geek the call center, contact center podcast. We try to give you some action while items to take back in your contact center Improve the overall quality, improve your agent experience, hopefully improve your customer experience as well. I Hope everybody had an amazing Thanksgiving. We're kind of rolling on here towards the the big holiday of Christmas. I wanted to again talk about maybe the bridge between actual contact center operations and AI again, as I've been kind of talking about them. I think all of us are getting kind of AI'd out and there's kind of getting so much repetitive information that a lot of it Right now isn't very new and it's kind of getting boring. So I'm getting a lot of questions from smaller contact centers because I think with our auto QA product we've been kind of talking a lot about smaller Under 100 seat, 25 seat, 10 seat, 75 seat. You know this, this under 100 seat contact center world, and I think it's opened up a lot of really interesting conversations with a lot of you out there that you feel like you're kind of being left out of the loop with a lot of things that that enterprise technology wants to, you know, give to some of the bigger contact centers, so a Lot of you as well, try to jump on some technology that maybe you don't need. Maybe you're spending things and you have a salesperson in your ear, you know, talking about hey, we have this tool, we have this and you got to have this. This is what everybody's getting now, and I want to kind of clear through all that, push it to the side and say what are the real tools that you need from me? Utilitarian kind of. I got to set my contact center up, I got to have these to be, you know, kind of in the game, to kind of moving to more luxury tools that maybe, if you have budget to purchase in a 2024, 2025 but my goal is not here to sell technology might hear. My goal here is really to tell you what technology you need or don't need, in my opinion, from the consulting side. So I want to kind of get into that and hopefully, again, if you guys have any questions on this and you see me live here on linkedin, please, please, ask away. So the the the biggest question that always happens is you know what?

Speaker 1: 2:47

Let's just talk about the platforms and I think that there's a huge discrepancy on what you need, depending on the size of your contact center. I don't think that that's rocket science or that's not really anything that you didn't know, but there's a huge sliding scale on this. A lot of small contact centers, like if you're got a micro, like say, you have 10 seats, you may not need any type of major C-cast platform right, that you're gonna, you're gonna pay, you know, anywhere from, I'll say, 150 to 250 dollars a month per agent. There's a lot of really good you cast Right unified communications as a service platforms that you can utilize kind of as your contact center. If you are smaller and you don't need a lot of the bells and whistles and you can do that stuff on the, you know, super, super cheap, like under 40 bucks a month kind of thing, and With some of this you can get some basic contact center features to Like there may be an additional add-on for for a skills based routing kind of piece within your ucast like you can kind of Play around a little bit understandably it's going to be a little bit More stringent and how you can use it right where you know the big platforms are. Just there's crazy amounts of things you can do.

Speaker 1: 4:06

But for if you're 10 seats and under, you really just need somebody to take, you know, take voice, maybe take email, maybe have a chat slapped on there, right and though. And if you're 10 seats and you're doing all three, that's probably a lot. If you're just doing one or the other, it's a, it's a no-brainer, that really. That's, that's all you need. If you're getting over 25, you're getting into the 50s, and then, especially if you're over 50 seats and you're you are a contact center and you're doing customer service work, you're doing sales work and we're talking mostly inbound here, then that's when you're gonna look to go to a real C cast provider and you guys know I've did a couple or did a podcast about three or four episodes ago as well, on kind of my favorite C cast providers. I'm not gonna get into that today. If you have any questions on that, please feel free to ask me and be more than happy to help you or kind of guide you on that.

Speaker 1: 4:59

But that's when I think you got to get into for sure, skills-based routing. You're gonna probably look to do some more integration work. Right, you need some better dashboards. You need the better reporting, looking at service levels, looking at handle times, looking at specific agent statistics and KPIs. They're gonna do a much better job in the C cast world than on the UCAS world with a lot of those kind of insular reporting and those kind of things. I think that's one of the biggest differences the UCAS guys can. They can still integrate with anything, right. So the integration stuff that still kind of comes into play with both of them. But you know, when you talk about real skills-based routing, even going beyond that, you know having an IVR, those type of tools, you know that's when you really got a. You know really looked at to look at the, the cloud C cast providers, in my opinion, I would never look at a on-prem solution in 2023, 2024, I think. On-prem is is is dead, in my opinion, from a New purchase and I know there's a lot of legacy. A lot of you guys are still out there looking that were on a on-prem. But you know, moving into AI and I'm not saying there's not ways to do it it's much easier Right for these newer technologies if you're, if you're connecting to things that are that are in the cloud here's.

Speaker 1: 6:19

I get into a lot of arguments with this, but if you are under fifty seats, I don't think that you should spend one dime on workforce management. I really don't, especially if you're twenty five seats and under them it's almost always no. Don't spend money on that. Go spend your budget on something else. I have done a really awesome and if you guys want it I can send it to you if you ask in a robust early and see calculator. If you don't. Order early and see calculators is basically the calculation how, how we do staffing and taking into account shrinkage and taking time and service levels and kind of that math that goes into that so that you can see how many agents you need per interval. There's a ton of them that are online. So that's all you need, right? If you get into the point where your fifty, seventy five getting into that world, then then it's a discussion.

Speaker 1: 7:16

I don't think that everybody, I still don't think you have to have it, but it becomes the rrr. I think starts to make a little bit more sense when you you're above fifty and your closer to a hundred seats. To have workforce management, to have people trade their shift, to be able to see schedule here, it's all those types of things, but I still think you can get away without it. Once you're over a hundred, you have to have it, I mean, or things get really confusing pretty quickly with how you're scheduling and staffing and I think if you're over a hundred seats as well, your volume dictates that you need to be able to forecast that out, and that's another tool that comes with all the really cool workforce management platforms as you get to forecast. So I think that's another another deal. All right, qa.

Speaker 1: 8:07

So if you are, again, I think, under hundred seats, especially under fifty, I don't think that you have to have a quality assurance platform that's tied into your. You know c cast that you can utilize. Now it's cool, I think it's, it's a bonus. But if we're on a budget here as of right now, I think that there are, there's a lot of options out there. But you can just set some things up in excel Right, if you know. If you're that kind of bare bones, that will work relatively well, especially if you're under fifty seats.

Speaker 1: 8:40

If you start to get more higher up fifty or more, it does get a little bit more difficult to make sure that you know you're You're keeping tabs in. The reporting aspect of how you're scoring kind of comes into play. But there's a lot of contact centers I know that are doing it and again I'm gonna cheat plug this right now our auto qa platform. We are focused just on Contact centers that are under a hundred seats, that are using excel spreadsheets or google sheets, and we're using chat gbt to fully automate your qa process. So If we're doing that now, there's gonna be a lot of tools out there that are gonna be extremely inexpensive that you're gonna be able to use a I Will tell you right now you could do this on your own. You could go just to the desktop version of chat gbt Preferably chat gbt for right pay the twenty box and take your form, take a transcript, throw it out there, have chat gbt, go score your calls right. That's how we started this whole thing and you'll be able to start to tweak and kind of see how you can do some really cool things and how you can scale quickly your qa platform or your qa scoring.

Speaker 1: 9:57

So again, that that's one of the I've been saying it's one of the low hanging fruits when it comes to cx and Q a. I still said I know I probably am a little bit wrong here I said by the end of twenty twenty three that scoring of qa calls is gonna be totally gone, totally automated. I think I'm a year off or maybe eight months off. I fully think that our auto qa, once we launch here in probably the next three or four weeks with a beta, is gonna just wipe away anybody that wants to or needs to do excel. It's gonna be just a better platform. Instead of taking fifteen minutes, you can take twenty seconds right again. I'm not getting into the auto stuff kind of already did, but Really cool stuff that I think I is taking control there and the cost of that are are coming way down.

Speaker 1: 10:48

The other thing I think that you do need is some type of knowledge management or some type of kms. We've been again. This is another tool that you can use with chat gpt. If you have the kind of the paid version, you can create your own gpt's when we can upload all your training documents, every single thing to do with pricing and All the information about your product or your service, and it basically becomes like a chat gpt or google search just based on your information, which is pretty cool. But there's a lot of companies that are out there that are very inexpensive, worst case, have a share point, have something like that. Your agents can get information that they don't have to Talk to you or talk to the supervisor as well. I think that that that's something here.

Speaker 1: 11:38

And just quick question here on linkedin. You made an interesting comment about inbound. I run a contact center that is Community or portal. First. We are smaller, under fifty seats. We are Providing application support, reusing teams for video calls with the customers. We have not Push c cast but I miss the technology and some of the functionality. My question is more on the need of a c cast, given the more complex, lower volume we are engaged in. Is it needed? I? Is it needed Chris? That's a great question and I don't think complexity of problem problem has to do too much with if you go you cast or if you went to a c cast provider. Now All of your you cast, like if like again, like for all day in at xp via.

Speaker 1: 12:23

We use next tiva for office phones, right, basically, are you cast platform? So just internal calls on calls the office they need to Ring someone's extension? Next tiva has we're not even close to using I don't really need to but full integrations with teams, full integration with with a ton of different c? R m's. They also have their own kind of Smaller type contact center stuff too that you can get with. That. I think it is more size right size scope. And then what do you need to do with calls?

Speaker 1: 12:54

So when it comes to integrations, I think you're fine, but when it comes to routing of calls, when it comes to reporting, reporting is a huge aspect of where the c cast world is, from real time to historical. But you know, if you're using it with teams, everyone is going to be able to integrate from the? U cast or c cast side is going to be able to integrate with teams Fully multi channel on, say, omni channel, multi channel in my world is kind of the kind of annoyingly the same thing. So, yeah, I mean, I hope that that answers that question again, I don't, I think we discount and I probably do too. We discount with the? U cast guys can do Right, but there's so much that you know they're getting so technologically advanced that it just really becomes more to again reporting and those kind of things.

Speaker 1: 13:45

And then, if you want to move To really cool things, like if you want to have workforce management, if you want to have analytics, I think that's, you know, that's where you would want to say, hey, yeah, we want to go, we want to, we want to go see cast. Yeah, and again, chris. So his, his kind of follow up is you know they are, they're fully remote, remote when it comes to seeing who's logged in and the status. You can't, and that's the, that's the biggest piece of it. Again, I would talk to and I don't know who you're, who, again, you're using just teams. But, like again, even the smaller u cast guys, that'll be cheap, right, that'll be maybe Anywhere from twenty to forty bucks, depending on what you do per month, per agent. A lot of them have a smaller kind of slap on Contact center, small piece, right, so it's not this full robust contact center, but I'm not for you be able to see agents and see what they're doing, getting service level, average handle time, like really basic stuff that you can see from a dashboard at least see the, like you said, see what they're logged in. So, yeah, I hope that helps. That's a great question. Appreciate that. It fits perfectly with kind of what we're talking about today and I think that there's a lot of confusion in that. Like, what do we do? Do I need this, do I need that? So, again, thank you, appreciate you. Yeah, okay Again, if you want to get into, like I just said, to the cooler tools, some of the UCAS guys will talk about analytics and they'll say they have it.

Speaker 1: 15:18

I think it's kind of very light. I would say it's analytics light. If you want to get into something deeper, you really need to get into that CCAS world as well. The other thing that I would say that every single contact center needs, no matter your size, is a CRM, and there's a lot of questions on what CRM do we get. I would tell you I love for, if you are super small, 10 seats, 15 seats, 7 seats, the ZOHOs, the Zendesso, the world, are very inexpensive, very much easier to use and, I think, can add a lot to what you want to do. You don't have to have like a full-born programmer, like you really do, for Salesforce to get anything out of it. You can create your own kind of gooey as well. We have done that for some specific clients, especially on the outbound side. Well, the database, have a gooey that we can make outbound calls, type back into that. Make sure that we keep update to notes. For most of you, that's what you're going to need. There's also some really small when we first started. This is like 2010 and I think they're still around.

Speaker 1: 16:28

I loved it Like, no, this isn't a CRM or this is not a real CRM. That was the name of the company. I'm probably doing a disservice, but it was some kind of funny name like that. It was really just really basic, like name, address, phone number notes. You could just slide them into categories. You could have a sales one where it would be like hey, just notify the client, hey, they're in contract, hey, they're in here. Or you could just use it as kind of an inbound customer service. Very basic, just name notes For a lot of contact centers. That's really all you need.

Speaker 1: 17:03

Now. Again, if you're getting 50, 75, 100 seats a little bit more higher volume yeah, you're going to need something that is a little bit more robust. Again, I'm not going to get into things like how you can auto write and integrate into it, but I think that that's where, again, no matter what Zoho, zendesk, salesforce, any CRM you have, ucas or CCAS you could fully integrate. You could do screen pops, you could do those kind of things. So that's the other thing that I think is a for sure that you need when you talk about computers like I get that question a lot too, like, hey, what computers do you buy, what computers do we need?

Speaker 1: 17:44

And for us we have found that initially let's talk about what we did before and now. What we're doing now is we would go purchase a lot of times like 23 inch all-in-one refurbished Lenovo's, like that was that's kind of our house computer. There's a bunch of websites there that you could purchase them again that were like a year out refurbished. So we would end up paying like 399 or 499 dollars a computer. They would last like three or four years. They're great hardworking machines, love those.

Speaker 1: 18:18

But what we have found recently is we've gotten into Chrome OS. So Chrome OS is basically the operating system that we're moving all of our agents to. So we're either buying Chrome boxes or Chromebooks and then having a monitor kind of slapped onto it, and those things are dirt cheap too right. So 299 or 399 bucks kind of all depending. So they're almost cheaper or as cheap, as inexpensive as the Lenovo's, but they're brand new and then we have much more control over and again don't need to be a huge fan of the Chrome OS operating system.

Speaker 1: 18:52

I can't recommend it enough for anybody's contact center, the ease of use of it, the amount of security. It takes away all of your. You don't need to be a huge fan of the Chrome OS operating system. Enterprise virus protection right, it takes away all your security aspects. You can fully lock it down. It's awesome. And you can even see where the actual computer's at, like you can see if they're at, like Starbucks, taking calls. You can see there's no more. Hey, my internet's out, because you can see if their internet is actually up or not, based on logging into their system. And that's the other thing the logging in and logging out of the actual computer. You don't need a third party for that either. So it kind of for one price of like five bucks a month, right, yeah, I think so, because it's $60 a license per year you get enterprise virus protection. You'd be able to log in remotely, you can lock the machine down, you get all these kind of other kind of really cool tools. So that's kind of what we do. I don't think you should be paying unless your company is flush with cash, paying $1,000 or $1,200 for a computer for the agents. I think that there's a lot of ways that you don't need to do that and get the same kind of bang for your buck with it as well.

Speaker 1: 20:07

Head sets as a prior is a cultural thing. I think there's a lot of really expensive, awesome headsets. We normally by be in the world of anywhere from $25 to $50, depending on what is honestly for sale on Amazon at the time. We also, though, have about three headsets that our agents, our reps, have approved, so we would never go out and just buy a headset and say here's your new headsets. They'd be like dude, if they haven't approved, you're in for a world of pain. So we just kind of say, hey, here's five headsets, what ones do you guys like? You know they'll normally pick two or three of them, and we'll just get an assortment of those. But again, when it comes to headsets, if you have people in the office, when it comes to chairs, make sure you get a buying from the agents with that as well, or you're in a. You will be in a world of pain.

Speaker 1: 20:59

And then again, just depending on what you need, if you have just the windows machines, you got to make sure that you have data security. You have to make sure that you have a way to keep updates updated on your system. You have to have virus protection. You have to be able to really lock the machine down. I don't care if you're five seats, 10 seats, 20 seats. You need to have that security kind of protocols in play.

Speaker 1: 21:22

So if I was starting a, if somebody said, hey Tom, I want to pay you money, can you set me up? I want a basic 10 seat 20 seat contact center Right, I'd be looking at. Do we need C-Caster, ucas? So I'm going to try to spend the most amount of money on the platform Right, my budget is going mostly towards that. I'm going to say I don't need workforce management. I'm going to use AI for quality assurance. So I'm going to have very little to that, but I'm going to be able to scale that very quickly. I'm going to have questions about do we need analytics or not? That's going to play into our UCAS or C-CAS. I'm going to get a Zoho, a Zendesk, crm and start to be able to build that out.

Speaker 1: 22:00

We can talk about the operating system that we want to go to. If we want to use Windows or we want to use a Chrome OS, I can work in either of those worlds for about the same price. I think the Chrome OS is where I would push the company towards. And then we would be getting those $20 to $30 headsets. And if I have Chrome OS, I don't need to worry about anything else. But if I have a Windows machine, then we got to have virus protection, we got to be able to lock the machine down, we have to be able to be remote into the computer as well. So those would be my for sure must haves.

Speaker 1: 22:33

And then if you were telling me, hey, we've got to do a 50-seater hire, can you set my center up? Yep, I'm going. The best C-CAS platform for us. I'm getting analytics, workforce management and it better be part of the platform that I'm doing From a quality assurance standpoint. I'm either going to utilize that platform that they have or I'm still going to probably do the AI route because I can scale that much cheaper and do many more in the time period. Again, like I said, I would get analytics. I'm over 50 seats.

Speaker 1: 23:04

Then again, this is not an AI conversation, but then we can really start to talk about some other tools, like do we have budget for agent assist? What are we doing from a self-service standpoint? I think some of those things come into play a little bit more. Maybe not, maybe that's not true. I mean, I guess if you are smaller, you may want some more extra self-service as well. It's very difficult to get any type of AI generative chatbot with with the providers of today, just from an ROI standpoint, right, because it's crazy expensive at this second to do things on a smaller scale. Now that that will all be coming down, not to say you can't find it, but you know the main players in the space have crazy high minimums and the the cost per call is still pretty high. The technology is cool, but you're gonna pay for it. So, again, that's why I don't I haven't really included too much of that.

Speaker 1: 23:58

Other than you know you can do some basic self-service stuff, basic chatbot stuff as well, and then again, like I said, with the computers and the headsets, what we would kind of do. So that's kind of what I would, how I would set that up. The stuff that I think that you guys need, integrations are always coming to play. Integrations are the easiest thing ever, right, they stress people out the most, but to be if you have a cloud, anything you cast CCAS and and you have any type of CRM that has open APIs, then if you can't do it yourself. From a professional services standpoint, that's one of the easiest things to integrate with. So it is the something you don't need to stress out about.

Speaker 1: 24:43

I don't even we're almost included in here, because I'm just assuming that you're gonna have that integrated. And Again, for even if you have no idea what you're doing for a couple thousand bucks If not a couple hundred bucks, depending on on what is pre-built already you know you can get a full integration with with your deal. And if you can't, if you can't do that cheap, then come talk to me. I'll make sure that we can do it for you for that cheap. So I Hope that helps you guys. Again, something a little different I'm gonna keep until the end of the year kind of getting off the AI deal, and then probably go full bore again as we launch Auto QA and talk more about AI In that in the first quarter of 2024,. But again, chris, thanks for for joining, thanks for the question. Hopefully that helped you as well too, and I'll talk to you guys next week. I