Your Genesys Blog Subscription has been confirmed!
Please add genesys@email.genesys.com to your safe sender list to ensure you receive the weekly blog notifications.
Double the fun, a peach of a pair, tea for two. Twice is nice when it comes to many things, including Genesys being the only contact center vendor named a leader in two 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrants.
Yet, there are times when one is the nicest number of all.
For example, a cloud contact center solution provider that provides one company CX offers many advantages over a vendor with a marketecture solution compiled of components developed separately from two or more companies.
With rising customer expectations, the stakes have never been higher to deliver magnificent customer experiences. Today’s customers expect omnichannel engagement across a rapidly growing number of channels. A fully integrated platform with synchronized engineering provides the one company experience to seamlessly support both current and future goals.
This leads to an important question.
How can you determine if a cloud provider has a one company CX solution or is promoting what appears to be a marketecture only offer, by bundling existing products and marketing them as something new?
In other words, is the proposed cloud solution really as nice as it seems?
On the surface, it can be difficult to determine. But, if you dig a little deeper, and ask the right questions, you’ll likely find that the marketecture solution lacks consistency with some undesirable gaps and shortcomings.
Here are some important questions to ask as you compare cloud contact center solutions:
- Is the vendor you are looking at truly providing a single customer experience to you?
The fact that the proposal is on a sheet of paper with one company logo does not always mean you are dealing with one organization. Especially if the offer is built on what used to be two companies that have recently become one. The entire solution may not be offered by one unified team. - Is the technology stack based on a homogenous architecture?
If a cloud solution isn’t supported by an end-to-end microservices architecture, there may be significant limitations that can impact operations. A modern, consistent and truly modern cloud architecture provides the necessary elasticity, resilience, disaster recovery and fault-tolerance to meet SLAs and support present and long-term goals. - Can the platform be administered through a single administration tool?
- Moves, adds and changes are daily contact center activities that require time and diligence. If the solution offered has two user administrations, it may require twice the effort to make changes every day.
- Does the vendor continuously deliver new capabilities?A cloud-based contact center solution is more than just a provider hosting your contact center technology in the cloud. A true cloud-based contact center applies an integrated cloud philosophy to run the solution and continuously provide new capabilities and enhancements. Check how frequently new capabilities are implemented to determine the level of commitment to innovation. It is common practice for vendors of cloud solutions to publish this on a weekly basis.
The questions listed above all boil down to the same overall question. How “pure” is the cloud contact center technology that is being offered? Chances are that under the cover, it’s far more convoluted than you would expect. The reality is that not every cloud solution offers the benefits of the cloud.
In essence, you could place cloud contact center solutions into five unique categories:
- Managed service – The solution is still on-premise, but operated by someone else.
- Hosted service – Basically an on-premise solution, hosted by someone, but dedicated and only for your company.
- Adapted to cloud – Some changes have been made to the architecture to offer some cloud benefits, such as multi-tenancy (one platform used by multiple customers) and remote administration capabilities.
- Incepted in cloud – The solution was built to operate as a cloud offer only but does not provide true elasticity, consistent microservices architecture or openness.
- Genesys Cloud – A Genesys Cloud-based contact center solution offers all the benefits you would expect from a platform built from day one to be a cloud solution. This means it’s truly microservices based, API first, offers all the benefits of elasticity, simple and transparent pricing, and has the openness to add or build 3rd party capabilities.
Compare and Contrast
Choosing the cloud contact center solution that meets your needs is no simple task. The following information can help you get started:
The Gartner Magic Quadrant evaluates cloud contact center solutions by providing an unbiased comparison of the leading vendors’ strengths and cautions. Read the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service, North America.
Brian Bishoff, Vice President of Cloud operations and Xander Dumain, Senior Software Engineer at Genesys share their thoughts and insights in this video.
Genesys Cloud is one of the few solutions that fits in the category of real cloud solutions. To learn more about how Genesys Cloud sets the standard over other cloud contact centers, read the Top 10 Reasons to Choose Genesys Cloud.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
