Proof of Concept vs a Trial

The potential applications of speech analytics technology in contact centres has been well known amongst industry insiders for years now. The technology regularly finds itself as the central theme of many contact centre and customer experience conferences around the world, and as a piece of the RPA and AI puzzle that large organisations are so intent on solving.

And yet, there is still an inherent risk in implementing this technology because the unfortunate reality is: there are so many ways to do it wrong.

So how do you minimise this risk and make sure that the solution you choose is the right one for your business? Traditionally this has been achieved by a thorough RFP process which would produce extensive feature matrices and technical specification lists to encourage apples for apples comparisons between vendors.

Over time, organisations became increasingly aware that dedicating years worth of procurement resources just to decide on a technology provider who over-promised and under-delivered on their solution was less than ideal.

Well how about a POC, which would be a validation of the technology in an environment much more representative of the real thing? Rather than being told what a solution could do, you could be shown the value through plugging in real call data and in some cases, a controlled sandbox environment to use. This is a reasonable attempt at emulating the real thing, however it’s still a controlled and often limited scale environment.

This approach has generally been successful for both vendors and customers for some time, given the historical difficulty of implementing speech analytics solutions. That used to be the best way, but as with many legacy processes in the era of rapid innovation, there is a better way.

Here’s where the trial comes in.

The beauty of maturing tech stacks and the ubiquity of cloud solutions is that implementation no longer needs to be its own project. Some speech analytics solutions (such as daisee’s Lisa), can be live and providing value within 2-3 weeks, rather than the historical 6-8 month implementation processes offered by some of the older legacy behemoths. What this means is that the investment from both vendor and customer becomes negligible when the implementation is simply plug in / plug out at very low cost.

The trial allows for organisations to have a low cost, real life experience of what the product would look like, sometimes with even less commitment than engaging in a POC or RFP process.

Plug it in, try it out. If you don’t like it, take it out, and if you do like it, keep it in.