As a result,
organizations are now rushing to provide additional service channels as
consumers demand varied types of collaboration when they engage with
organizations. The telephone is no longer a consumer's primary point of contact
with an organization, while at the same time, mobile and social media interactions
are increasingly making the contact center's role more important than ever.
One in five
(19.2 percent) contact centers are already managing smartphone applications,
while 33.1 percent of businesses are supporting social media – nearly double the
18.6 percent reported in 2011. A further 14.4 percent expect to have a
capability in place within the next 12 months, by which time 46.3 percent will
be using Web chat to positively drive Internet traffic to a successful outcome.
What's more, organizations are implementing these new contact center options
mainly as a result of customer demand.
Other key
findings in this year's report include:
Few
businesses are gauging the customer experience of non-agent, self-help
channels:
-- Self-service
channels have become more prevalent in today's contact centers; however,
organizations are not measuring the cost-to-serve of these channels and are not
gauging their customers' experience of non-agent, self-help channels. This
contradicts emerging practices that link customer satisfaction scores directly
to profitability, such as the tracking of share price performance against the
'voice of the customer' – a growing trend among forward-thinking organizations.
-- The
subsequent absence of cost measurement activity on every channel outside of the
telephone is staggering. Only 27.9 percent of Internet, 19.4 percent of Web
chat, 9.9 percent of social media, and 6.1 percent of smartphone application
contacts are being measured. Only 14.6 percent of participants have any plans
to impose measurements. This indicates significant neglect by organizations as
they struggle to adequately enable investment into new channels through proven
business case validations.
-- Interactive
voice response (IVR) self-service systems rank second only to Web usage as the
most offered self-help path. However, 50.6 percent of contact centers don't
schedule any regular reviews of their IVR systems and nearly three quarters
(72.4 percent) are needlessly frustrating their customers by not passing information
collected in the IVR through to agents.
Aging
technology is a big challenge:
-- Many
contact centers are wrestling with aging technology, which is expensive to
maintain and upgrade. Due to the complexity of existing technology
environments, integration, lack of flexibility and upgrades are the most common
challenges being experienced.
-- In
addition, there is a progressive move away from applying a dedicated contact
center technology strategy to incorporate it into the wider enterprise customer
management strategy (now at 66.8 percent). Investment for upgrades and
enhancements are harder to authorize and are driving the need to consider
alternative sourcing models for specific functionality that include cloud-based
solutions on a pay-as-you-use operating expenditure model.
Cloud
continues to play an important role:
-- Many
organizations are beginning to recognize the benefits of cloud-based solutions.
It has doubled in its importance from Dimension Data's 2011 Contact Center
Benchmarking results. As organizations will need to find a way to use, re-use
and upgrade existing technologies, the inevitable migration will likely be
using a hybrid approach, with an appropriate ownership model selected for each
application.
Contact
center needs are being lost in overall technology strategy:
-- Already,
30.4 percent of contact centers report they have no, or limited, involvement in
the design of business requirements for new technology solutions. Of
these, 7.2 percent state that it's purely a contact center decision. For
sourcing, it is 40.2 percent as the enterprise technology strategy takes hold.
These results clearly highlight an industry transition point in terms of
accountability and responsibility for contact center business requirements and
the sourcing of technology.
-- Therefore,
there's a real danger that the specific needs of contact center get lost. Just
59 percent of participants believe their current core infrastructure components
(includes CRM, CTI, routing, self-service and workforce optimization) meets
their current needs, while for future needs, this figure drops considerably to
a mere 13.8 percent.
More information and metrics on benchmarking contact centers can be found at www.SupportIndustry.com
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