Contact Centre Analytics: Build versus Buy

Contact Centre Analytics: Build versus Buy

What is best for your contact centre?

As Client Manager at Customer Science Group, I talk to a lot of customers that want to do more with?contact centre analytics?and move beyond the native capabilities of a cloud contact centre solution. Data driven insights, that drive business decisions, are more important than ever, as companies rely on data to help them improve the employee & customer experience and understand more about their associated behaviours. Critically, there is a need for companies to look at aggregated data, from multiple data sources across the business, not just contact centre data in isolation.

In my experience, most conversations that I have with customers inevitably lead to the build v buy debate.

When it comes to advanced contact centre analytics, every customer has the option of either building their own in-house connector to extract the data from their contact centre platform or purchasing a third-party product from any number of analytics vendors.?Each option has its own advantages and disadvantages, and the decision will ultimately depend on the specific needs and resources of the business.

Here are my thoughts on the pros and cons of build versus buy.

Build

Pros: –

• Building your own solution allows customers to choose which data they ingest into their data environment.
• If your business has a legacy/non-standard data source, then building your own capability may be the only solution.
• Building your own solution means that you remain in control of the development process.

Cons: –

• Building a customised solution can be very costly as it requires skilled developers and resources to build and then maintain.
• Developing a customised solution can be very time consuming, taking resources away from other important projects.
• The ongoing support & maintenance of a customised solution can leave a business exposed if the developers that built the solution leave the organisation.
• Building an effective analytics solution requires a combination of expert skill sets including data analysis, software development, UX design and an understanding of the contact centre environment.

Buy

Pros: –

• A third-party pre-built solution can often be more cost effective than developing from scratch as it eliminates the need for development resources.
• Speed of implementation – a pre-built solution will undoubtedly be faster to implement, with users being operational in a matter of hours.
• Easy access to expertise regarding support and ongoing maintenance

?Cons: –

• Third party solutions may not always offer the level of customisation that the business requires in regard to integration with other data sources which can lead to gaps in reporting.
• When purchasing a third-party solution, the business becomes dependent on that vendor for ongoing support & updates.

Whether your contact centre analytics requirements have moved beyond what native platform capabilities provide, or you have an existing third-party solution that isn’t meeting your expectations, or even if you are still debating build versus buy, reach out to me Emma Duncan and let’s have a chat.

Written by?Emma Duncan