Come on, Contact Centers! Offer me some affordable, “already-developed” integrations to make my life easier!

I recently outsourced a telesales campaign with an onshore outsourcer to set-up sales appointments. The winning outsourcer did a fine job and the results were better than we expected (good contact rates, the list was accurate, etc.). It was a fairly low-tech campaign: we simply provided a script and a list and they gave us back reports and data files on a daily basis. So, it worked and we were “sort-of” happy.

But, now I've got a lot of manual work on my end just to get that data back into my salesforce automation system (we use salesforce.com). And while that, too, is a relatively low-tech affair and fairly easy to do, it's a time-consuming process that I would much rather not have to deal with. It’s just not a good use of my time – and my company can’t afford to hire a full-time DBA to handle the delicate process of data migration and management.

Now, I knew at the outset that I wanted to have this data automatically imported into my system of choice - but none of the outsourcers I vetted could achieve this without a significant development effort that would inflate my cost for the campaign. I was forced to accept daily data dumps in flat Excel files, or pay far more than I wanted to for basic data migration.

Methinks this is a very common occurrence in the contact center industry, and I think outsourcers are missing a huge opportunity to exceed customer expectations. With all of the great technology out there for system integration and process orchestration, it seems smart contact centers would optimize their centers by creating a set of core services that can be re-used over and over again.

I don’t know the specifics of salesforce.com’s marketshare, but I would hazard a guess that they have a significant piece of the small to medium-business market for CRM and SFA. Don’t these outsourcers know this? And why don’t they have ready to go integration points into salesforce.com, or other leading brands of CRM tools?

I don’t know why – but I know it needs to change. And it needs to change right now. Get smart and think about what your customer wants and needs. Suck-up the investment in implementing an integration platform and building some integration points into the most popular SFA and CRM systems. And don’t charge an arm and a leg for it. Satisfy the customer once, and they’ll come back for more excellence. Disappoint them once, and you’ve lost your opportunity for future business.

Mind you, I’m not advocating for salesforce.com, per se, I’m simply advocating a service-oriented approach for contact centers to do a better job of meeting minimum expectations.

Let me end this blog/rant with full disclosure: I work for a company that solves the very problems I describe here. It is particularly frustrating to know how easily and painlessly contact centers could optimize their architecture to provide a more service-oriented approach. And in case you might think this is aimed at "selling," you're right! It is. But let's say I was advocating physical fitness. Just because I sell weight-lifting equipment doesn't mean that you don't need to get your body in shape!