People, process, and technology

Hi, welcome back, everybody. Thanks so much for tuning in.

Today, we are talking about people, process, and technology within the contact center. Now, people; the reason why we start there is they are the number one asset inside a contact center. They are what makes that world spin around, and they're incredibly important. But, the reason why I have these words positioned the way that I do--people process, technology--is that that very much is the order that you'll find when you're inside the contact center.

People number one. We need to get them in. We need to be able to service their customers. 75 percent of most operating budgets are dedicated towards people. That doesn't leave a whole lot of room to be able to go out and make other purchases and start digging in where we want to. And as we look at the types of people that are in there, these are just a few bullets of the many different unique teams inside a contact center. But we have quality assurance who are monitoring calls, making sure that we're following the right procedures. We have workforce management that are ensuring that there are people in seats waiting to take those calls and that they're where they are when they need to be there. We have sales specialists that are out there trying to cross-sell, upsell, and take care of the customers that way.

But then we look at process, and then as a leader there, we're thinking about, all right, what are all the ways that we need to service our customers? And so we have different teams out there like the general customer service, technical support, concierge, premier level type of support, and there's a million different types of processes under each team. So we're constantly tweaking and evolving and seeing where we need to go there and then.

Finally, technology tends to come last, and again a lot of that has to do with just the nature that most of our budget is directed by people. It typically holds the budget that we'll use those tools that we purchase and buy, but what we find is that inside a typical contact center, there are so many different types of technology. Maybe there's been lots of acquisitions, and we've inherited their tools. Maybe we're just going out, and we're spot-checking, and we're grabbing a chat because somebody says they wanted to engage with us in chat. Maybe we're out there social listening, and we've grabbed a tool for that, and we have all these different, disparate tools that don't talk to each other. And that's what makes the contact center really confusing. It's important to understand this and why it's set this way.

Now, if you're selling into a contact center, it's really important that you get into the business first. You need to get in front of them. You need to get their buy-in. You need to let them see how Pega is uniquely positioned to pull the people, process, and technology all together, regardless of maybe their technology stack. Maybe it's not unified code; maybe it's not speaking together our ability to integrate and expose one we need to is really, really powerful, so we get business buy-in first, and then when we go from there, then when the timing is right, we pull in our friends from the IT shop. We let them know what Pega is capable of, and we work together that way, but just understand that as you go in, people aren't thinking about technology all day long.

First and foremost, inside of the contact center, it is very much this way people process technology, and so it's your job to go in there, understand where they're coming from, and then be able to tie all those pieces together and pull them through.

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