Consulting

Bridgepointe chief strategy officer Scott Kinka said that for agents, CCaaS and CX represent the most common technology bucket where clients require upfront consulting. That’s in part because customers who change their CCaaS platforms do so because something is broken in the current system.

Namely, the implementation process was broken. 

“If a contact center implementation goes poorly, it’s almost never that the platform doesn’t work. It’s that they didn’t install it smartly. The customer didn’t know what they didn’t know,” Kinka said.

But the challenge with consulting customers around this technology is that partners must engage with an entirely different person. Although the CIO and CFO are still peripherally involved, partners will primarily engage with the client’s contact center leader. And that means speaking an entirely different language.

“They’re talking in terms of their NPS. They’re talking in terms of the average speed of answer, mean time to repair, mean time to book an order. It’s just a completely different lexicon, and they’re expecting different things,” he said. “That’s the one challenge: How do you speak that buyer language?”

Kinka said an average strategist can make due when engaging with midmarket and SMB contact centers, oftening leveraging solutions engineers from the vendors. 

However, Kinka said more and more deals revolve around specific business needs than technology platform requisites.

“It’s not like, ‘Give me a piece of software that does X.’ That’s not the question they’re getting asked. What they’re getting asked is, ‘I need to be able to answer the phone faster. I need to be able to get people offshore. I need to go to get people at home. I need to be able to get 50% of my calls to not actually make it to somebody in the contact center, but I want them to be able to be self-service.’ They are needs-based conversations, and it’s hard for your average seller in the field to translate that into, ‘Oh, you need 10,000 seats of Five9,'” Kinka said.

PPT Solutions can give Bridgepointe strategists the consulting firepower they need to answer those questions. And PPT, which specializes in CX solutions, connects to a customer base that has engaged with Bridgepointe agents for all of their other technology needs. 

“The strategist has done the network. The strategist did the WAN. The strategist did the data center. Maybe they’re in there on UCaaS, and then the CCaaS opportunity comes up,” Kinka said.