When looking to purchase a customer service solution, buyers have to remember that more features is not better; many times more is just more. In fact, when you don’t need or can’t use extra features, more is sometimes worse.
With this in mind, we see that customer service solutions fall into two primary groups to choose from:
- Customer service solutions for enterprise organizations. Customer service vendors focused on large organizations — organizations with typically 1,000 or more agents who are primarily phone agents — offer robust case management, agent guidance in addition to CTI integration, reporting, analytics and data management capabilities. These vendor solutions can scale to serve very large agent populations, in the tens of thousands or higher. These products have been traditionally been sold as on-premise products, but many deployments are now shifting to the cloud. Many vendors offer deeply vertical solutions, and have pre- and post-sale company resources dedicated to support their vertical products. Vendors in this category also target midsize organizations, offering prepackaged versions of their solutions with more affordable price tags. The leading vendors in this category are highlighted our most recent Customer Service Wave for enterprise organizations.
- Customer service solutions for midsize and small organization. Vendors primarily target these solutions at teams with hundreds of customer service agents or fewer who support inquiries over a breadth of voice, digital, and social communication channels. Other vendors target their solutions at divisions of customer service organizations that have dedicated teams for digital and social customer service within a larger contact center. These solutions are highly usable and have a broad, deep set of omnichannel customer service capabilities including knowledge management. They are predominately cloud solutions and offer a rapid time-to-value. Some vendors in this category are looking to move up-market and are seeing success in larger contact centers. The leading vendors in this category are highlighted our most recent Customer Service Wave for midsize organizations.
Be aware of your needs, and don’t focus on the depth and breadth of features that each vendor offers as these can confuse the end user, and make them less productive. Focus on vendors that support your exact needs, and can work with you to make you successful in engaging with your customers.
