Is it just me, or has anybody else really not taken issue with the recent pricing changes for Contact Center?
Most small businesses don't run call centers. But they do like and implement queues to better handle customer calls, especially during peak periods in the day. That is often all they need for normal day-to-day operation.
As a value added reseller, I often recommend the Contact Center Add-On for the managers/supervisors, so they can monitor queue activity in real-time, and use Contact Center analytics to help drive business decisions. Often times I use it myself on behalf of my clients to provided additional value. This helps me to strengthen my relationship with my clients.
The new billing policy for Contact Center results in an additional Contact Center seat being added to the bill for each user/device that takes a call from a queue, regardless of whether or not that user is assigned a Contact Center Agent license and uses any of the Agent license capabilities. Personally, I see two issues with this. Firstly, for customers with a term contract, many view this as a breach of contract on the part of GoTo. Secondly, from a cost perspective, most can't justify the additional cost for just the real-time metrics and analytics. Depending on how many users/devices are taking calls for a queue, customers can see their bill double in cost.
The only wait to avoid the increase in cost is to remove Contact Center completely. But this removes the real-time displays and queue analytics for the supervisors which is a very useful capability.
Seems GoTo has made this decision in a vacuum without any input from it's partners and impact this has on their relationship with their clients. And they are adamant about it. I've been trying to work this with GoTo since the first announcement 6 months ago. But I have not been able to make any progress.
It bewilders me that GoTo would rather tell customers to remove the Contact Center add-on than find a why to allow them to keep the feature/capability they were sold. The ability to sell Contact Center as an add-on just for the metrics and analytics was a differentiator for GoTo. They've taken that away. I can't see how I can recommend Contact Center for any small business that is not a true call center. And without the differentiator, it makes that much harder for GoTo to compete against the likes of 8x8.
What do you all think about this billing policy change?
Should GoTo offer a Contact Center SKU that allows supervisors to have the real-time displays and Analytics without billing each user/device that takes a call from a queue?
