Why is it important to upgrade your contact centre software?

Hi, my name is Rhiannon Fae, and I am the Service Delivery Manager for the UK and Americas at Geomant. I have worked in the IT service delivery, operations and service management industry for the last 20 years. The world we work in has evolved a lot in that time! The contact centre has probably changed beyond recognition, there are no longer banks of phones on desks, they have been replaced with softphones on the PC or laptop.  Now, a combination of software applications are joined together to provide the end-user with the tools they need to deliver the services expected by the 21^st-century customer who in turn has multiple channels available to them to invoke that contact.

The economic and social pressures the contact centre has faced over the years has brought us to the place we are today – living in an app economy. While this is exciting, it also presents an array of unprecedented challenges. The need to maintain product version currency via solid upgrade strategies has never been greater. With technology being a major factor in the success or failure of businesses, it is critical that you carefully and strategically consider remaining current on your software products. In this blog, I explain the top three reasons why it’s important to upgrade your contact centre software.

1. New releases mean better functionality and improved user experience

Since the user is the centre of the developer's universe, they want to make your experience better with every release, that’s why you'll find user experience and user interaction will improve with most new software releases. New releases include new features and functionality that help your efficiency.

2. Upgrading helps to keep up with customer demands

Taking into consideration the high speed at which customer demands evolve if you don’t upgrade your system with each new release, you can quickly find yourself falling behind. The tools developed with these releases will be the tools that customers expect you to use as part of your service strategy. Take omnichannel for instance, customers now demand an omnichannel experience. If you’ve kept up with system upgrades, agents will have slowly been introduced to the omnichannel working dynamic, and it won’t feel like a huge operational change. On the other hand, if you’ve slipped behind, gaining an omnichannel dynamic in your contact centre might seem like a giant leap from where you are.

3. Old software can come with a cost burden

As a practical matter, older software versions used in production can become a cost burden for an IT department, and even for the business as staff try to keep up with hardware, software and applications. An older version can require more attention, more time to support and more workarounds as technology is deployed, upgraded and integrated. So while it might seem more cost-effective to keep your old software, most of the time an upgrade will be beneficial all round. If you're more than 2 versions behind, you are probably also on an extended support contract (more expensive) or an unsupported version.  You don’t always need to be on the latest greatest version; however, it is prudent not to slip more than 2 versions behind the current as this is when you’ll start to see an increase in support costs.

Whilst we at Geomant support older versions this comes at a cost in extended support.  Most of our software upgrades are included in the support contract, the only additional costs are the professional services required to perform the upgrade itself. If you want to discuss your upgrade options, please contact your account manager today.