... AN ACQUISITION DOES NOT JUST CHANGE LOGOS OR LEADERSHIP; IT REWIRES THE DNA OF HOW PEOPLE SERVE CUSTOMERS.
CONTACT CENTER INTEGRATION
BY MICHAEL BIDWELL
ILLUSTRATION PROVIDED BY ADOBE STOCK
TURNING ACQUISITION CHAOS INTO CLARITY
HOW TO UNTANGLE MERGED CONTACT
If you have ever lived through a merger or acquisition( M & A), you know the feeling. Systems do not talk, processes overlap, and everyone insists their way is the right way.
In my career leading customer service and contact center operations through multiple integrations, I have learned that an acquisition does not just change logos or leadership; it rewires the DNA of how people serve customers.
In this article, I am going to outline the experience of one such M & A that I was involved with to illustrate the key challenges and how they were resolved, step by step, that could give you guidance
48 CONTACT CENTER PIPELINE
CENTER OPERATIONS.
should your contact center be facing similar integration with other centers.
WHEN M & A CAME KNOCKING
In this example, a retailer, each acquired business brought its own ecosystem with unique order-to-cash models, pricing logic, escalation paths, and definitions of what“ urgent” even meant.
One team used Outlook for tracking orders, another used spreadsheets, and a third used a legacy CRM last updated during the Obama Administration.
Suddenly, the contact center was not just a support function. It was the intersection of competing worlds. We were not tasked with merging systems but with building a new, shared experience.
... AN ACQUISITION DOES NOT JUST CHANGE LOGOS OR LEADERSHIP; IT REWIRES THE DNA OF HOW PEOPLE SERVE CUSTOMERS.