2: Cloud Contact Centers — Key Uncertainties to Consider
Making sense of our uncertain times
This article is part 2 in the series “Adjusting your Cloud Product Deployment/Offer to a Coronavirus Driven World”. You can find part 1: Cloud Contact Centers — New Rules of the Game in the series here.
When working on a product strategy, business case, or validating a product value proposition, I have often struggled with how to approach uncertainty in the market. Anybody working on this right now may agree.
I have always found that stakeholders always tend to focus on any uncertainty first.
For example, if you only use a simple metric, such as +/- a percentage on revenue, you can leave your analysis or plan open to debate.
Uncertainty takes time to overcome. What if you could reduce stakeholder discussion time by 50%?
I have found that it helps to tell a story that your stakeholders can understand.
The approach I have learned works best is to tell a story that provides insights. With insights that are easy to digest, the debate will be meaningful.
Describe uncertainty systematically and put it into recognizable boxes.
Using the Fox Model (see part 1) helps you to build a solid rationale for your options and recommendations. Quadrant 2 focuses on uncertainty and developing your scenarios. Exactly what you need to build your story for your product strategy and business case. Using the Fox model does not replace other more traditional tools and frameworks. Using scenario planning tools and methods can enhance the quality of your analysis. It can also get you a step closer to not missing something really important. Something, if missed, may come back to bite you. I hate that!
The PESTEL framework is one tool for analyzing the current macro-environmental forces. It enables you to analyze the current pandemic driven uncertainty in boxes that are easy to communicate. It helps you build your story in a format that people will recognize.
Political
It makes sense at this level to consider each country as a specific case and look at the approach in that market:
- What is the pandemic mitigation strategy?
- Is there a lockdown strategy?
- What are the recovery phases?
- Is it succeeding?
- What are the next steps?
What could these impact? (e.g. will these impact how you would deploy a contact centre or its operation?)
Economic
Differentiate between factors that are rules of the game and general forces. In this example, the focus is on macroeconomic forces. Global think tanks, analysts, and consulting houses all provide useful information that you can use. Take into account a range of views.
Some examples to consider:
- General impact on GDP
- The specific impact on vertical industry segments
- Depth of any recession and time to recover
- Support schemes given to businesses
- Support schemes given to citizens
What is the impact on the availability of resources and skills?
Social
Driven by the current pandemic, social changes may have a disproportionate impact on how businesses operate. In our example, consider contact center operations and the management of contact center infrastructure.
How long, to what degree and what impact?
Examples to consider:
- Social distancing?
- Resource availability?
- Citizen confidence?
Product management and product marketing teams often make use of “personas” to describe users. Right now, it is worth considering changes to any personas that are in use. For example, remote working and changes to the rules of the game will change any contact center related personas. Supervisors and agents are obvious ones. I will look at this in much more detail in a separate article. Stay tuned for that one.
Technical
In the intro to this series of articles, I highlighted the anticipated change in the adoption rate of cloud contact center platforms.
Large and small contact center ecosystem vendors have been quick to react to the crisis. Most rolled out specific pandemic related product offers within weeks. These may have helped to speed up the move to the cloud as companies and governments reacted to the crisis.
They also help to change and shape customer expectations.
The question is what, how, how long?
Technical areas that can impact on your product or business model:
- Changes in product capability
- Changes in product technical deployment model
- Changes in the product support model
- Pandemic related, time-bound product commercial offers
One follow-on question could be: How do these impact my organization’s technical value-add?
Environmental
Normally you would consider the external macro-environmental factors. Right now, it may be worth considering external and internal factors that may impact on your options.
Are external factors causing changes to your organisations Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policy? Are any potential changes short term or likely to become permanent?
The increase in remote working during lockdown could result in a permanent change. Companies may embrace and encourage working from home permanently (lower carbon footprint). This, in turn, could impact your operating model. They could shape your value proposition for customers that focus on environmental benefits.
Legislative
The current pandemic is rewriting the operating manual for everyone. Legislative and regulatory frameworks remain in place and active. They have not been relaxed, in a few cases, they have been enhanced.
- GDPR in the EU
- PCI/DSS
- Country telecoms regulations
- Trade restrictions
- Travel restrictions
Mapping out each regulatory framework and assessing any impacts in the short and medium term is critical.
For example:
- What are the security impacts of remote working for contact center agents?
- How does this impact on GDPR and PCI/DSS compliance?
International relations are also something to consider. Brexit and the US/China trade debate are examples that can have very direct implications on your product.
A no-deal Brexit could impact on the availability of a vendor cloud offering that you may be building into your value proposition. The impact could be different depending on whether you are in the UK or the EU.
US/China trade uncertainty could impact supply chains, exchange rates and component availability.
Being aware of these and any potential impact is something to factor into your thinking. There may well be no impact, but awareness will avoid any surprises.
Putting it all together
So far, we have considered changes to the rules of the game and taken a systematic look at uncertainty. The next step is to build different scenarios as input to your product planning.
The aim is not to become a scenario planning practitioner. But using some of the same tools and approaches can help to ensure that you don’t miss something critical when considering your next move.
In part 3 we put the rules of the game together with the key uncertainties to consider possible scenarios that may impact specifically on the contact center ecosystem.
If you want to comment, agree, disagree, make an observation; please feel free to post a comment. I will respond. Or you are welcome to connect with me on LinkedIn.
Thanks for reading!
