Technology is changing. Your competitors are changing. The market is changing. And your budget is changing. This means your contact center is overdue for an overhaul—and you have the business case to prove it.

Fortunately, your number-crunching and painstaking slide deck manipulation has paid off; your budget for a contact center transformation was approved. Now the real work begins. The first step is to determine who needs to be involved in the platform decision-making process and how to narrow down your choices. Start with a list of requirements.

Consider any regulatory requirements your company has, such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and GDPR, as well as any that go beyond industry standards. For this, you’ll need to include someone with a legal background. If your company has an information security team, they’ll want to contribute too. You might also want someone to help integrate the platform architecture with existing tools. Once you have these requirements defined, remove any solution that doesn’t meet them.

The next step is to determine who will install, build and administer your new contact center environment. The IT team likely has several people who can contribute to your success, but you should check with your network administration team first. They can evaluate traffic, confirm available bandwidth and provide any necessary configuration changes that will keep the solution running smoothly. The network team also ensures that any new tools pass traffic securely across your network.

If your company has separate teams for contact center and voice administration, appoint someone from each to your contact center transformation team. These members will know which technical requirements the new tool must meet; they’ll need to work with the entire team throughout delivery. In some companies, the network team and the voice team are the same, or network administrators handle information security. It’s helpful to have a flexible IT team, as long as they all consider these different areas in the planning stage.

At this point, your contact center project might feel a bit complicated. Make certain you have a technical project manager involved. Not only can a project manager keep things on track, but this person also identifies other possible stakeholders. He or she will also make sure that contact center platforms you evaluate will meet your growing list of requirements.

Next, bring your business partners into the conversation. They’ll want to know how the new platform streamlines interactions with their customers, how to integrate it with existing systems and how to minimize the impact on their teams during migration and implementation.

Once you review demos from vendors, your business partners can determine if the tool will help—or complicate—their processes. They’ll also want to know how the tool integrates with or replaces legacy tools. These integration points might need to involve other groups, such as email or case management teams. You also should get details on reporting and analytics requirements. Identifying these early in the process will prevent any unpleasant surprises from cropping up during testing phases.

Finally, pull in a representative or two from the contact center agents to identify requirements and help with testing and deployment. These agents can drive adoption and make changes feel a bit less intrusive for other representatives. Too often, tools are deployed for contact center teams without consideration for how the change actually affects those teams. In the contact center—where minutes translate to money— these teams must be a part of the decision-making process and their ideas must be heard.

Having representation from your business partners sets your project up for success from the beginning. If all your business units are invested early, they’ll want to see your shared vision come to life.

For more information, read the white paper: Architecture spotlight: Three considerations when choosing cloud for your contact center.