When Buying Solutions Look at Corporate Stability

I came across a fine in-depth report from Forrester Research, The Forrester Wave™:
Customer Service Software Solutions, Q4 2008

The study has an excellent premise: how the technology can help companies provide better customer experiences. Its author, Dr. Natalie L. Petouhoff, Forrester Senior Analyst, says "before a company even thinks about a software vendor they need to define their customer strategy, what they want their customer experience to be and how they want to provide service to their customers."

Then I saw the writeup on Entellium, which has been having its fair share of troubles lately, and I began to wonder: should such reports look at the vendors' financial and legal history and stability? That has a big impact on whether their technologies will deliver the goods; if the suppliers have gone belly-up who will be there to support the solutions and keep them updated? New owners of the firms or the patents may, or may not, decide to buy and continue to support all product lines and their customers.

With the economy still going south at the same time as contact centers mature as a market, expect more mergers, and shutdowns, and such issues to arise. Tough times have a not unfortunately foolproof way of weeding out the useless and the incompetent, leaving the strong, well-managed, financed, and the lucky.