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Social media and web chat on the rise

Contact centers are still primarily focused on managing Telephone and E-mail channels, but the new appearance of Social Media this year shows nearly a fifth are already managing social media interactions, with more planning to do so over the next two years. We expect to see more than half of centers adopting Web Chat and anticipate that web chat and instant messaging will become more integrated.

More focus on efficiency

Increased Efficiency is this year’s top commercial driver for contact centers, while Improve Service is still ranked higher than any other driver across the board. At the same time we see an increased focus on customer satisfaction and specifically Net Promoter Scores (NPS) TM, a positive indicator that more attention will be placed on growing the value of existing customers.

Using management information (MI) to add value to customer engagement

As operational budgets come under pressure, sales targets will rise and demand management will be high on operational agendas, along with improving the quality of the customer and employee experience. This will mean agents will need more freedom to engage with customers in a more natural way, and intelligent MI about customers will help add value to the conversation, and enable them to identify and explore sales opportunities.

Contact growth is highest across non-telephony channels

Growth in multi-channel contacts continues to exceed the growth in phone-based contacts, and organisations will develop greater operational expertise and technology solutions to reduce response times. There is a growing trend towards measuring costs, most noticeably for non-telephony channels. While more respondents are measuring costs across multiple channels, it is surprising that organisations are still not doing this as a matter of course.

Customer segmentation practices still not being understood

Around a third of contact centers have no customer segmentation model in place. While this doesn’t vary significantly based on center size, we do see particular industries more likely to adopt a segmentation approach. At the same time, it is interesting to see that one of the most mature regions has the lowest adoption of customer segmentation.

Back to basics for first contact resolution

Advisor Knowledge has remained the number one ranked factor to positively and negatively impact first contact resolution (FCR). This is followed closely by Systems/Information Access and Agent Listening and Comprehension Skills. However in some industries (most notably Financial Services) the need for end-to-end processes is highlighted as being second only to Advisor Knowledge when it comes to having a positive impact on FCR.

More ownership and accountability required when it comes to hand-offs

Staying fairly similar to last year’s results, respondents stated they had the capability to track and view the status of all enquiries handed off within the center or other business areas. Concerning is the fact that two of the largest and most mature industries (Financial Services and Service Providers) scored quite badly in their capability to track hand-offs compared to the overall average. This indicates a negative continuation in terms of a lack of ownership and accountability – which we know from consumer feedback, is one of the biggest causes of frustration with contact centers.

Customer satisfaction replaces cost reduction as top self-service driver

Results show an emerging desire by providers to improve telephony self-service, and a shift in focus and greater emphasis on improving customer satisfaction – replacing cost reduction as the top priority consideration for self-service deployments.

Large imbalance in measuring self-service user satisfaction

A low level of management information tracking the customer experience of automated services shows there is a clear opportunity for improvement. Nearly a third of centers don’t even measure (IVR) customer feedback, and astounding is the high proportion that don’t believe they can claim any sort of competitive advantage based upon their self-service capability.

Integration is the key to a consistent customer experience

Only a quarter of web and telephony systems are integrated, which is impacting on the delivery of a more consistent customer experience through improved agent access to detailed customer profile information. The high number of organisations with no integration between their web and telephony systems seems to be linked to the relative immaturity of the industry and region.

Load balancing still not common practice

Load balancing is still not common practice for just over two thirds of respondents. Despite the fact that close to two thirds have more than one contact center, only about half of these load balance between centers. Larger operations and those that have ‘follow-the-sun’ strategies appear to be better positioned to load balance.

Homeworking growing in popularity

Homeworking is on the rise across every region. The US has the largest proportion of homeworkers, nearly doubling in only a year, while Asia-Pacific has overtaken Australia and New Zealand, to occupy second place. Europe has tripled the number of homeworking agents, while in Africa and Middle East, we see a small rise, perhaps an indicator of improving technology and bandwidth issues. The Technology sector uses the most homeworkers, while Consumer Goods and Retail and Financial Services use them the least.

Staff turnover – a costly exercise

This year’s results reflect an overall annual staff turnover of over a third, a significant deterioration since the last Report, and perhaps somewhat explained by industry-wide economic cutbacks over the period. For any contact center finding itself in a growth period, the challenge of replacing over a third of its staff per year, as well as having to find new staff, can be serious and costly in terms of the loss of knowledge and experience.

Enterprise-wide technology upgrades on the rise

Upgrades of contact center technology have increased significantly and show that technology advances have matured to a level where many have identified the business benefits of such upgrades. Contact centers do need a very specific focus and strategy when it comes to their applications – where decisions about technology are very specific to the contact center’s business objectives.

How new channels are changing technologies

As channels evolve so too will technologies, which means organisations will have to continually review them and work with leading vendors to keep abreast of new developments. At the same time we expect more cloud providers to emerge with their offerings of very specific, highly complex Applications-as-a-Service (XaaS) options, which will better enable contact centers to keep up with developments.

IP pivotal to unlocking cloud service opportunities

Cloud services for contact centers continue to grow as organisations explore their advantages to the wider business. The introduction of IP into the contact center is pivotal to ensuring technology becomes cloud based and gives cloud providers the ability to provision contact center infrastructures that are reliable, flexible and cost effective.

To view the full results of Dimension Data’s 2011 Global Contact Center Benchmarking Report, visit: www.dimensiondata.com/microsites/ccbenchmarking.