EliteCX, E78 Partners Team on CCaaS Implementations, Pro Services

Advisory firm E78 Partners and professional services firm EliteCX are working together to fill gaps for businesses purchasing customer experience (CX) platforms.

Illinois-based E78 and Utah-based EliteCX have built a strategic partnership in which Elite assists E78's technology advisory practice with professional services and consulting. Their partnership focuses on the rapidly growing contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) and customer-experience (CX) market.

E78 and Elite CX are announcing the partnership as newly formed EliteCX starts to roll out partnerships with technology services distributors (TSDs) to assist other technology advisors (TAs) with implementing CX platforms.

The CX Gap

CX is a notoriously harder nut to crack for partners owing to its complexity. Nabila Lulow, E78's vice president of enterprise technology solutions, said CX engagements require a wide range of consulting and services. Partners must invest a heavy amount of time and energy to bring their customers through the process of evaluation selection, implementation and management.

"And quite frankly, the market's shifting to where clients are wanting more of a consultative approach early on. If a client's thinking about moving their contact center in a year, they're starting the process now, and they're wanting more of a consultative approach of somebody coming in and saying, 'OK, let me evaluate your current situation and provide you to-be state and a roadmap to get there.' Your traditional agent has had challenges doing that, because it's more complex," Lulow told Channel Futures.

Related:Avant Looks Beyond CCaaS with CX Effect Acquisition

Lulow said that when she joined E78, the company had already driven more than $5 million in CX/CCaaS deals over the last three years, predominantly through running requests for proposals (RFPs) on behalf its clients. If E78 deepened its consulting around CX, Lulow posited, the company stood to reap the benefits.

Fortune Business Insights projects the global CCaaS market to grow about $6 billion in 2024 to nearly $24 billion in 2032. And channel partners, including technology advisors like E78 and Elite CX's sister company, Elite Solutions, are eying their share of that growth.

Elite's Todd Gorringe

In the meantime, Elite Solutions had spun out EliteCX to solve headaches for customers that Elite Solutions' was advising on CX. Those headaches are in the area of professional services and consulting.

Todd Gorringe, principal at Elite Solutions, pointed to misaligned expectation as the biggest killer for customers in their CX procurements.

“What they saw in the demo doesn't end up being what they're delivered. That to me is the most common thing that happens in our space that we can go in and fix with a proper discovery upfront," Gorringe told Channel Futures.

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And even if everything is up to specification, end customers bemoan delayed implementations from vendors.

“We're running into customers that are getting quoted four months before they can even engage with a project manager on a project," said Darlene Stephens, principal at Elite Solutions.

Considering that contact center evaluations can last upward of a year, such a delay hurts.

"You have a timeline to kick off your project and install," Lulow said. "You don't want to be delayed because of the supplier."

CX vendors openly admit those challenges. Five9 CEO Dan Burkland said the CCaaS provider will be making "significant incremental investments to scale professional services," which currently represent 9% of Five9's revenue. But as companies like Five9 increase in revenue and customers, their capacity to support those implementations come under increased pressure.

“There is a cost to those companies' own success, and that is, the support gets thinner and thinner and what I like to call more vanilla," said Dan Eyring, who left a Salesforce system integrator to lead EliteCX. "There's nothing wrong with vanilla. Vanilla tastes great, but is it what someone wants for everything?”

Related:InflowCX Buy Gives Amplix In-House CCaaS Talent, Services

Partners are leading 60% of implementations, and indications are that Five9 and other CX numbers want to see those numbers increase.

“We're hearing from all of [the vendors] that it is really hard to support your own product. You can either focus on service or you can focus on product. Where they make their money is on product, and they need to put all of their smart minds together on coming up with the latest and greatest features and functionality," Eyring said. "Getting bogged down in the individual use cases of customers is a really tough thing for them to do, and quite frankly, they admittedly don't do it very well.”

CCaaS Implementation Options

Technology advisors have turned to numerous partners for CX pro services in recent years. Two notable ones are PPT Solutions and InflowCX, which E78 "superagency" competitors Bridgepointe and Amplix purchased in 2022 and 2023, respectively.

Gorringe said many of the available implementation partners require the TA to give them a piece of their ongoing monthly commissions (from the vendor). EliteCX bills the end customer hourly for its consulting and does its implementations for a flat fee. Gorringe added that the implementation partners may place a customer success manager on the client's account. And that CSM may encroach on the referring tech advisor's customer, Gorringe said.

“We can leave behind a technical account manager [TAM] but not a CSM, to help with the ongoing management of that. They'll include whoever sold the deal on all of those calls if they want, and we will not be selling into that account," Gorringe said. "Going forward, if there's an opportunity that comes around, we'll throw that over to the partner. And the partner can choose to use this for that or not. So there will be no competitive efforts on our part in any of these accounts.”

Lulow said EliteCX's respect of swim lanes is what made her feel comfortable doing business with the outfitter.

“They're looking to do a traditional true partnership, where they respect your client and protect the integrity of your account. They're not looking to go and insert themselves and start cannibal cannibalizing your business," she said. "And that is a challenge in the channel, because in my experience organizations want to assume as much of the business than as they can.”

EliteCX is joining TSD Avant as a supplier, and will be working working toward the same status with Telarus.

“The TAs are generally more comfortable going through the TSD because there's some protection there for them with non-circumvention clauses and such," Stephens told Channel Futures. "So I think that's definitely the direction that we're going to want to continue with.”

Lulow said collaborative relationships between technology advisors will help them succeed in the burgeoning CX market. That's especially the case as large consultancies, value-added resellers and system integrators sign up with the CX vendors.

“My belief is that there's enough of that pie to go around. There's such a big opportunity, and if we as partners within the community lean into each other, we can grow our business a lot quicker and scale, and it will be better for everybody," Lulow said.