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Because performance management can deliver a return on investment through lower operating costs and staff attrition, better sales production and supervisor productivity, contact center decision makers have naturally become curious about the best way to leverage these solutions. As with any major investment in corporate infrastructure, the decision to buy or build a performance management solution must be considered.
Performance management solutions were initially championed in the 1990s by small, best-of-breed companies with short track records. Seeking to minimize vendor risk with unknown firms, a number of early adopters felt more comfortable installing performance management solutions they developed and controlled internally. As performance management providers continued to thrive, business evolution took its course — smaller providers perished or were absorbed, stronger developers grew their customer bases and participated in mergers.
Determining the Best Long-Term Option
Even today, it is not uncommon for companies to attempt building their own performance management solution only to decide that buying is the better long-term option. One performance management vendor estimates 70 percent of its clients initially attempted internal development for their first-generation system but later made a strategic decision to buy a solution.
Now that top-shelf enterprise software developers with proven track records play a major role in performance management development, it is worth considering whether there remains a strong case for building performance management solutions internally.
The key strength of an internal, custom-developed application is that it can be tightly tailored to the client company''s unique business environment. Developers need not concern themselves with marketability to a broader range of clientele. However, they may need to consider the prospect of business expansion, including mergers with companies with different operating procedures and product lines.
Internal development relies on the experts in the customer’s business to define the solution they believe will be right for the company. And with development platforms completely dictated by the company''s own developers, meeting internal standards for security can be expedited.
Making Decisions Based on Value
Some arguments for internal development are based more on appearances than value. There may be strong resistance among the IT group to learn new applications — the "not built here" syndrome. C-level executives may prefer the appearance of investing company money on internal projects and the professional development of its own employees, rather than fund a software company''s operations.
This argument loses its luster, however, if it turns out that an "internal" built process requires the participation of outside contract programmers, or if pulling developers off of other projects to create a performance management solution means the company must rely on outsourcers to cover their previous IT workload.
Buying a third-party performance management solution may require a greater up-front investment in consulting services to ensure that the vendor understands the organization’s specific business needs. The strength of the "80/20" rule is also a potentially built-in weakness. Chances are that a leading performance management application will already support many of the organization’s most important business objectives. But there are likely to be gaps around unique operating practices, which will require additional time and effort to accommodate.
The decision to buy an existing performance management solution is a vote for the value of experience. Unlike an internal development group, which has but one chance to build a solid performance management application, an established vendor has already built a successful framework for performance management. This leads to faster deployment and mitigated implementation risks — prior customers have already served as a test bed for the application, so the performance management solution installed is that much more likely to succeed and deliver rapid results.
Gaining Access to a Wealth of Experience and Pre-built Functionality
Recognizing that fully tailored design is a chief source of competition, performance management solution developers have focused in recent years on an expanded range of out-of-the-box capabilities for a wide variety of businesses. Pre-built reporting tools as well as workflow integration, which caters to a variety of industries can be found in high-end performance management systems, mitigating the need for much of the custom consulting work that would have been necessary 5 to 10 years ago.
Generally speaking, outside vendors have greater experience linking performance management solutions to a range of databases and applications employed in the contact center. That distinction is vital, because performance management enables savvy managers to dig beneath the numbers for root causes to not just discover how long agents tend to spend on a particular type of caller issue, but how that time is allocated. This type of detailed analysis requires data from each relevant system and screen on the agent desktop. Established vendors often have an advantage in this type of data aggregation, having already built connectors to a variety of common enterprise systems, including CRM and ERP solutions.
Companies with established, leading-edge data warehouses developed internally may feel that they have already mastered the biggest challenges and think the next logical step is a custom performance management application. But an internally created data warehouse is only the first step, and successful execution of a data warehouse project does not ensure mastery of performance management techniques. That said, the investment in that data warehouse should prove useful even in a buy scenario — leading performance management vendors can and do work with existing data warehouses, provided they are up to modern specifications.
Guiding Project Success with a Strong Vision
Whether the center decides to build or a buy, development must be guided by a strong vision enforcing the project''s specifications to avoid running afoul of "creeping featurism" as multiple constituents can and will request changes well into the development cycle. The specification is as much about having access to the right internal staff as it is knowing the right questions to ask. Most companies have at least six other clearly delineated departments besides the contact center, and internal IT staff often focus on breadth rather than depth to satisfy the most critical requirements in the shortest time.
Ensuring Long-Term Health of the Solution
The stability of the developer is an important factor in the decision because the long-term health of any enterprise solution depends in large part on the quality and availability of ongoing support. Any company thats primary business is not the development and maintenance of enterprise software must carefully consider whether attracting and retaining application developers is a core competency, or whether a dedicated enterprise software provider will have a distinct competitive advantage in that area, leaving it with an inefficient application development and support group.
Similarly, a performance management vendor must be able to demonstrate that it has the resources and stability necessary to support its application for years to come in order to be seen as a viable long-term alternative to internal IT.
The growth of performance management vendors has mitigated many of the earlier vendor risks involved in purchasing a solution from a third party, and the important role maintenance revenue plays in their business models makes ongoing professional support likely. Internal builds offer a direct line to the project developers — but only so long as they remain employed with the firm. There is always the possibility that another business unit, or the CIO, may override the priority of ongoing application development and support for the performance management solution in favor of a new internal IT initiative.
Gaining Access to a Wide-Range of Enterprise Data
For a performance management solution to deliver on its promises, it must have access to a wide range of enterprise data and enable reporting and analysis that supports broad enterprise goals. At first blush, this may appear to support a case for an internal build, as an internal team could be seen as having first-hand understanding of overall company objectives while an outside vendor develops to an average or median company case. However, in the real world, software projects are often more narrowly defined than they need to be by a project manager who is not charged with keeping a big picture view.
In the contact center, this means that the manager specifying a performance management build may constrain the scope of a performance management system to only the world of metrics and objectives he or she is immediately able to measure, such as ACD data. ACD data is invaluable to any performance management project, but issues such as schedule adherence and average handle time ignore a number of big-picture, bottom-line matters performance management can help improve.
Adapting the Solution to Your Business Needs
Experienced, leading developers of performance management solutions have flexible systems and consulting resources that can be adapted to almost any business case. Regardless of the developer, a performance management solution must be ready to synthesize metrics that speak to true business value, such as the impact of the contact center on customer retention, offer conversions and lifetime value. Whether the answer is to build or to buy, a strong executive sponsorship is needed to oversee the definition of objectives, ensure that enough stakeholders are involved, and have a clear directive to work together on a successful performance management project. |
