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You have determined a need for a new technology in your
call center. Now it is time to get serious about selecting a
vendor for the technology elements that your center requires. It
is crucial that you establish a core team of people from across the
organization to participate in the vendor selection process. There
are three types of requirements that should be established in this
process, as illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1 - Three types of
technology solution requirements
Functional requirements
The fist step is to expand your business requirements
into functional requirements that will be the core of your
Request for
Proposal (RFP). Functional requirements add depth to the business
requirements, providing applications and
capabilities required from the
technical solutions being considered.
For example, if you are writing functional requirements
for a Quality Monitoring application, you'll need to answer the
following types of questions:
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How many observations are needed per week on
each agent?
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Do we want to record based on a schedule,
on-demand, or randomly?
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Who will be listening to the recorded calls and
what permissions will they have?
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Do we want to record voice only, voice and data
screens, or a variety of media (e.g., text chat, emails)?
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How long do we want to store all recordings?
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Will we want to access the recordings by Agent
ID, Customer ID, date and time, or other parameters?
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What reporting capabilities are required from
this system?
Technical requirements
In addition to function requirements, you need to
develop the technical requirements for your solution, and define the
professional services you require of the vendor. You should
consult your internal IT organization for support on technical
requirements.
Vendor requirements
Finally, you need to define the questions you'd like the
vendors to answer about themselves and their partners. The focus
of your requirements should be driven by Selection Criteria.
Determining selection criteria
Selection criteria define the basis on which you will
make a selection, and therefore influence the questions you ask in an
RFP, the context in which you evaluate responses, and how you score
vendors. It is important that the key organizational stakeholders,
contact center management and IT work together in this effort.
There are three steps to defining and using selection
criteria. They include the following:
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Agree on selection criteria
Keep the number of criteria low (not more than six), and pick
the ones that are critical to your organization. Define
each criteria with a set of statements.
Sample selection criteria
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Industry experience |
Features/functions |
Architecture |
| Vendor partnerships |
Scalability |
Vendor size/stability |
| Customization services |
Implementation services |
Fit with existing environment |
| International support |
Ability to deliver |
Post-sale support |
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- Weighting
All criteria are not of equal importance. After defining
the criteria, weight them. For example, "features and
functionality" may carry a weight of 40% of the total, with
"customization services" at 30%, "ability to deliver" at 20% and
"industry experience" at 10%.
- Scoring
Agree to the scoring mechanism up front, when defining criteria.
After you have received vendor responses and followed other
evaluation process steps, you will create scores for each of the
criteria. Each member of the team will score
independently, and averaged and weighted scores are applied.
Scoring is used to identify different interpretations and
understandings of vendor abilities, identifying areas that
require discussion to create common understanding. You can
also conduct sensitivity analysis of the weighting to validate
your scoring result.
Selecting a vendor
Remember, when selecting a technology vendor, you are entering a
partnership. You will want to partner with someone who can
deliver what they promise and will help you grow as your needs change.
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Complete |
Vendor selection checklist |
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1. |
Review vendor proposals. Submit
"clarifying questions" to vendors if portions of the RFP
response were unanswered or the responses were vague. |
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2. |
Whittle down the
responses to a short list of two or three finalists based on
your weighted vendor selection criteria. |
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3. |
Check references by phone
interviews and site visits. Ideally, find a customer in
your local area with similar technologies as those you're
looking for. You can ask them specific questions on the
local implementation team. |
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4. |
Invite the finalists into your
organization for a presentation. Give each vendor a
detailed agenda for the meeting highlighting your questions and
concerns. You want facts and answers, not a standard
marketing presentation. |
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5. |
Select your vendor. Use
the selection criteria, scoring, and discussion process. |
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6. |
Negotiate the contract and
verify roles and responsibilities. |
Successful implementation
Implementing a new contact center technology can be a daunting task.
The Call
Center Planning and Design Toolkit details how call center technology
fits in the broader context of call center planning and strategy.
It also includes keys to successful implementation, a Request for
Proposal (RFP) template and description, benefits and implementation
considerations for several contact center technologies. In
addition, the Call
Center Best Practices - Special technology edition shares lessons
learned from technology managers about the most effective technology
changes and their effect on customer satisfaction and call center
efficiency.
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