Any business that has a contact center knows that IT integrations have become an integral part of ensuring that your organization remains competitive and efficient. However, integrating new technology into your existing contact center environment can be a complex and daunting task, often fraught with challenges. The CardEasy team has years of experience integrating our solution with every kind of telco, contact center platform (traditional on-premise as well as cloud-based Contact Center as a Service), CRM, payment and tokenization providers, so we know what all the most common pitfalls are and how to avoid them. In this blog, we will explore some common hurdles that organizations face during IT integrations and discuss strategies for overcoming them.
Compatibility issues
One of the most common challenges with IT integrations is compatibility issues. Legacy systems may not easily mesh with modern technologies, resulting in data inconsistencies, errors, and operational disruptions. To mitigate this risk, organizations should undertake thorough compatibility assessments before embarking on any integration project. This involves evaluating the existing infrastructure, software, and hardware to identify potential roadblocks and ensure seamless integration.
Some of our competitors deal with this risk by locking clients into their own preferred telephony provider, contact center platform or other systems. This isn’t the case with CardEasy, however. We guarantee that our solution will work seamlessly with your existing contact center environment. When you’ve already invested significantly in your existing systems and set up workflows that work well for you, we believe that you shouldn’t have to change these in order to integrate secure payments, and with CardEasy you don’t have to.
Resistance to change
Employees often resist change, and IT integrations can be disruptive to established workflows. Overcoming resistance to change requires effective change management strategies. Organizations should communicate the benefits of both the integration and solution, provide ample training and support to employees, and involve key stakeholders in the decision-making process. Transparency and clear communication can significantly reduce resistance and foster a more positive transition.
Again, CardEasy offers an advantage here. Because our solution is so flexible, the changes to existing workflows are minimal making it much easier for you to get buy in from your contact center agents and other team members. Integrating CardEasy into the agent workflow right from the start minimizes the time you have to spend re-training agents and makes the switch to a new secure payment solution easier for both agents and customers.
Project management complexities
Effective project management is essential for successful IT integrations. Managing timelines, coordinating various stakeholders, and ensuring that the project stays on track and on budget are common challenges. We’ve worked on countless integrations across all different types of industries and contact center environments. We take a consultative approach and really take the time at the start of the process to make sure we’ve understood your requirements correctly and to offer you the solution that best fits your needs. Other vendors tend to offer much more of a one size fits all approach but that’s not how we do it at CardEasy. Together, we collaboratively identify the best way to seamlessly integrate the CardEasy solution into your existing contact center environment.
Vendor and partner collaboration
Many IT integrations involve collaboration with external vendors or partners, which can introduce complexities related to communication and coordination. To address this challenge, organizations should establish clear lines of communication with vendors and partners, define roles and responsibilities, and set expectations regarding project deliverables and timelines. Regular check-ins and status updates are also crucial to keep everyone aligned and informed.
We can help you manage this process. These types of integrations often involve a complex mix of internal and external stakeholders, so we help you to identify who the key stakeholders are that need to be involved at each stage of the project, both within your organization and from your other vendors.
IT integrations are an essential part of contact center management. While challenges may arise, a proactive and well-structured approach can help overcome these obstacles. Ultimately, our objective is to integrate CardEasy seamlessly into your existing contact center environment in such a way that nobody knows it is there. CardEasy sits in the background, working with your telephony, your CRM systems and your payment or tokenization provider in a way that’s completely unobtrusive with no significant changes to your agents’ workflow.
