In a recent whitepaper, we identified twelve questions to ask your prospective service cloud implementation partner. The second of those questions is “What does the partner know about contact centers?”

While there are many CRM implementation specialists to choose from, not all CRM implementation partners have equivalent capabilities. Many CRM implementation partners specialize in sales force automation deployments, not customer care. For organizations implementing Service Cloud functionality to support their customer care organizations, it is critical they find an implementation partner who really understands customer service and contact centers.

If your customer service operation is of any size at all, chances are you have established a contact center.  From a people, process and technology perspective, contact centers are some of the most complex entities in modern businesses.  By one count, large-scale contact centers utilize up to 37 different discrete types of technology, where the CRM/Service Cloud suite you are looking to implement only provides one component.

Given this kind of environment, it is essential that the partner understand not only contact centers, but also the role a CRM/Service Cloud system plays in a contact center.   They also need to understand how CRM supports the business objectives of a contact center, how CRM can be used to measure performance, how the CRM system should be set up to support the organization using the software, and how to make the CRM system work properly with all the other technologies being used in the contact center.  Without this kind of knowledge, you may have your CRM system implementation completed, but chances are it will not successfully support your contact center operations and business.

If you are looking to implement a Service Cloud, chances are you are either responsible for an entire contact center, or you are responsible for technology support for that contact center. Either way, you know how complex a contact center environment can be.  Ask yourself how long it took you to master all the different elements of your environment: agent recruiting and training; agent desktops; insourcing, outsourcing and home-agent models; KPIs such as FCR and AHT; skills groups and skills-based routing; customer self-service and knowledgebases; workforce management; quality management; performance management; command centers; telephony and more.

Now ask yourself how anyone who has never worked in a contact center could have more than just peripheral knowledge of how a contact center really works and operates. It can be very hard to understand the complexity of people, processes and technologies it takes to operate a contact center effectively without having worked in one.  It is even harder to implement new contact center technology solution without that experience. When an implementation partner team members have direct contact center experience they can apply to your project, you will wind up with a Service Cloud that fully aligns with your business objectives and operational requirements.

As a contact center consulting experts focused on optimizing customer engagement, we have seen numerous companies struggle to select the right Service Cloud implementation partner. If you would like to learn more about what other questions you should be asking your service cloud implementation partner, click the image below to download a free copy of the whitepaper “12 Questions to Ask Your Service Cloud Implementation Partner”.

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