| Call Center Research |
31.07.2007
The US Contact Center Operational Review - IP and Call Handling
By Steve Morrell
The figures from this year’s survey point to the use of IP within the contact center as being very much a thing of the here-and-now, rather than another possibility for the future. Despite the relatively slow start to IP implementation, these statistics point towards IP being an integral, definite and strategic part of the contact center industry’s future.
The mantra “evolution, not revolution” has been pushed by telephony vendors, encouraging contact centers to consider the option of moving at their own pace towards IP, and this is what has happened in recent years. However, there is a significant proportion of respondents (14%) using pure IP within their contact centers.
Of those 48% of contact center respondents which are not using any form of IP at the moment, 35% expect to be using IP in some form within 2 years. These figures show that IP is making its way further into the mainstream and is figuring in the thinking of many businesses’ contact center strategies.
Regardless of the geography or timing of IP surveys, reducing network costs has consistently been seen as one of the most important reasons for implementing IP, with almost two-thirds of our respondents rating it as very important. Having greater flexibility to add and change agents is also very important, as is the need to replace ACDs/PBXs which may have been bought to counter the Y2K problem, and which are now coming to the end of their useful life. Half of respondents believe that enabling new multimedia channels, such as video, is a key driver for IP decisions.
It is interesting to see that the second most important reason for implementing IP is that there has been a corporate decision to move all telephony onto an IP infrastructure, especially in medium and large contact centers, which are more likely to be part of a network of operations, as well as belonging to a large company which has massive internal corporate telephony needs that could benefit from IP telephony.
The effects that pure IP implementation has actually had (rather than the perceptions of what it could
do) revolve around inter-site cost reduction, and also the flexibility to add and change agents quickly, enabling homeworking and the virtual contact center model. This latter point is very interesting when comparing the expectations with reality: although those that implemented pure IP solutions did not do so with increasing agent flexibility in mind, the reality is that they have strongly benefited from this capability.
The US Contact Center Operational Review (1st edition - 2007) is a study of the performance, operations, technology and HR aspects of 204 US contact center operations. Download this Study for free at www.contactbabel-downloads.com. info@contactbabel.com
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30.07.2007
The US Contact Center Operational Review - Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
By Steve Morrell
At a claimed penetration rate of 63%, CRM seems to be a very popular solution in the contact center, seemingly being present in more operations than even IVR. However, this may be a matter of definition.
58% of respondents bought their CRM system from a third-party, compared to 42% who developed it in-house. The expense of in-house development can be guessed at by looking at the 80% of respondents in small contact centers which bought their CRM solution from a third-party. These solutions will, in the main, be very different in functionality and capability from the 33% of third-party systems present in large contact centers.
Cross-selling and up-selling can happen on both inbound and outbound calls, but the importance of selling off the back of an inbound service call is greatly increasing, as legislation against outbound calling becomes tighter in most countries. Added to this is the stated aim of many businesses to move their contact centers away from a being a service-based cost center to becoming a sales-focused profit center: crossselling and up-selling are becoming major ways to get the contact center to pay for itself.
Currently, respondents indicate that half of their agents are able to cross-sell or upsell within a call, with those in the healthcare and transport & travel sectors seeming particularly adept. Surprisingly, only 32% of respondents’ agents in the sales-driven world of retail & distribution were able to cross-sell or up-sell. There was little significant difference seen across contact center size bands, with 45% of agents in small contact centers and 55% in large contact centers being able to cross-sell or up-sell.
However, there are some inhibitors to increasing cross-selling / upselling ability. Generally speaking, there are worries that agents simply do not have the confidence or capabilities to move seamlessly from service to sales, with those in the insurance industry (where there are numerous complex and highly-regulated products) being particularly wary of this.
37% of respondents state that they are already under pressure to reduce call lengths so as to manage queue times, and that attempting more cross-selling and up-selling would exacerbate matters. In these cases, the wider business should be taking a more strategic look at the purpose of the contact center and measure the costbenefit equation associated with investing more in systems and people in order to reduce the missed revenues that are currently happening.
The US Contact Center Operational Review (1st edition - 2007) is a study of the performance, operations, technology and HR aspects of 204 US contact center operations. Download this Study for free at www.contactbabel-downloads.com. info@contactbabel.com
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27.07.2007
The US Contact Center Operational Review - Contact Centre Performance
By Steve Morrell
The success or otherwise of contact centers has traditionally been measured by observation of key metrics, usually related to cost and efficiency – average
call length, average speed to answer, % of calls answered within a certain time, etc.
While these figures are a useful and still widely-acknowledged and understood benchmark, times are changing, albeit slowly. Many contact centers now try to measure the effectiveness of their operation by tracking metrics such as first-time call resolution and customer satisfaction levels, although there are no standard measures or agreements on what constitutes a satisfied customer or fully-resolved call.
This does tend to strengthen the hand of those who believe that because the contact center can provide such detailed data on call volumes and handling times, then that is what it should primarily be measured against.
Respondents’ agents spend an average of just over 61% of their time on calls, with around 15% and 10% of time spent respectively on each of wrap-up and administration. Idle time accounts for over 8 minutes in the hour, however, there are clear variations in call handling capability from one market sector to another.
Although speed to answer is another of those traditional statistics which has always been measured, there is a strong case for keeping it at the forefront of how contact centers measure their success. peed to answer plays a vital part in improving the customer experience, and also feeds into other performance measures such as call abandonment rate.
Currently, the mean average ASA is 42 seconds. One-quarter of respondents answer the phone within 10 seconds on average, although 15% take over one minute. 72% of contact centers have an ASA under the mean of 42 seconds, with the median being 22 seconds.
The ability to understand a query and deal with it in a reasonable timeframe at the first time of asking is the key to a contact center’s success, reducing the overall number of calls while providing the customer with a good experience which will impact on the company’s overall performance. It also has a positive effect on the agent’s morale (and thus, staff attrition rates), and increases the chances of a successful cross-sell and upsell being made.
Overall, the mean average figure for first-call resolution is running at 72.8%, similar to the UK. As some respondents have a very poor first-call resolution rate, this can drag the average down, so it is important to understand that the median (midpoint) average is
80%.
The US Contact Center Operational Review (1st edition - 2007) is a study of the performance, operations, technology and HR aspects of 204 US contact center operations. Download this Study for free at www.contactbabel-downloads.com. info@contactbabel.com
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