| Call Center Research |
29.02.2008
Current and future business challenges for Call Centre Outsourcing Providers
Professor Bernd Stauss from the Ingolstadt School of Management sees the Call Center Outsourcing providers as an agent of a larger transformation process in the Call Center market, and in the BPO market.
In his survey, he compared both the Call Center Outsourcing providers’ and the Outsourcing clients’ view on the current role and business challenges BPOs and Call Center Outsourcers are facing.
One of the core results is that Call Centre Outsourcing providers must take on their role as an Innovator partnering with their client. They can achieve this through making profits for their clients, which in turn is possible through knowledge transfer and innovative impulses. The idea of profits through innovation is at the heart of his concept of BPO. It is only possible through sophisticated interaction with the outsourcing client.
More in the Softigator members’ area at
www.softigator.com/callcenterbusinessnetworking/start.html
If you have questions or comments to this article, get in touch at service@softigator.net.
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27.02.2008
Performance improvement of Call Centers including E-Mail Management
Henning Ahlert, COO of Internet provider 1&1 with 7 million customers, gave some interesting insight into Call Center performance improvement and integration into the overall organization.
With some three million emails and an average handling time of 4.5 minutes, the company would normally have needed to plan with a dedicated email management workforce of 175 call centre representatives. Thus, Ahlert took a look at his options to rationalize the operations.
More in the Softigator members’ area at
www.softigator.com/callcenterbusinessnetworking/start.html
If you have questions or comments to this article, get in touch at service@softigator.net.
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25.02.2008
Call Center World Berlin is increasing
From 18th to 21st of February the Call Center World opened its doors again in Berlin. With a visitor record of 6,500 Call Centre professionals going to convention and exhibition, the organizer reports an increase of 30% for their 10th anniversary. 214 exhibitors from 14 countries presented their products and services. 70 experts gave presentations.
Highlights included Don Peppers giving insight into his ideas of “Maximizing the value your customers create”, a showcase “Live Call Center” operating from the show and the Cat Award for the Call Center Managers of the year in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Softigator member Stefan Kalisch made it to the final round for the German candidate - congratulations, Stefan!
Other Softigator partners and members on the show included…
More in the Softigator members’ area at
http://www.softigator.com/callcenterbusinessnetworking/start.html
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15.02.2008
The UK Contact Centre Operational Review (2007) - Security and Disaster Recovery
By Steve Morrell.
There have been numerous recent media reports of fraud within the contact centre industry, both in domestic and offshore operations, with customer data and payment information being extracted from the contact centre by gangs acting through contact centre workers.
While a certain amount of fraud is almost inevitable in business, and the vast majority of contact centre staff are honest, the contact centre industry has once again come under the spotlight for its security practices, which in most cases seem to be sound.
Almost all respondents were confident that in case of a disaster preventing their contact centre from operating, their company had contingency plans. However, as only 42% of respondents stated that they had access to additional agents in case of an emergency, the presence of a disaster recovery plan can’t be said to be the same thing as actually being able to copy with a full shutdown.
To enable a seamless and rapid return to service, a contact centre needs staff, systems and data to be in place. This latter point is only covered by 85% of respondents, with those in the public sector, services and retail & distribution industries notably poorer performers.
Only 22% of respondents employ a professional disaster recovery firm to hold their back-up data, with 62% using another part of the parent company, and 16% going for the belt-and-braces approach of using both.
Off-site data storers
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Proportion of respondents
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|---|
3rd party
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22%
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Other company-owned site
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62%
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Both
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16%
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Alternative agents are most likely to be available at other sites belonging to the company, although an outsourcer stands available in the case of 29% of respondents.
The author is a Softigator member. You can contact him directly to ask questions or to comment on this article. Click on "search" in the member area and contact the author. You are also invited to comment on this article at service@softigator.net.
The UK Contact Centre Operational Review (5th edition – 2007) can be downloaded at www.contactbabel-downloads.com. info@contactbabel.com.
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15.02.2008
The UK Contact Centre Operational Review (2007) - Contact Centre Strategy
By Steve Morrell.
Most of this report has been about how contact centres are performing today, as should be the case with an operational review. The final chapter looks at the issues that keep contact centre managers awake at night, and asks them which trends they believe will most affect their contact centre operations.
The answers to these questions are that HR issues (attrition, recruitment, resourcing and absence) are currently what make contact centre managers most concerned. Looking further into the future, the need to measure and improve customer satisfaction seems to be becoming an obsession throughout the industry, which is positive for customers and businesses. However, much of the short-term investment coming from the wider business seems to be focused towards technology, often looking more at improving efficiency than effectiveness.
Self-service, especially through speech rather than touchtone IVR, is also an area which ContactBabel strongly believes will become vital to the contact mix, and judging by respondents’ answers, IP is also now mainstream. The spectre of high attrition is becoming clearer every year, with UK rates now almost of high as those within the US.
Analysing the areas that contact centres are focusing their expenditure upon was quite complicated, as there was rarely definite concurrence. However, investing in CRM came out as the no.1 specific investment opportunity for 10% of respondents, with ACD updates also generally strong. Amongst the IT-connected issues, a general need for a technology refresh was top of the agenda for 17% of respondents, and interestingly, figured as either the second or third top issue for a further 38% of contact centres. Training investment was also high on the agenda, and a significant proportion of respondents were improving and/or expanding their operations.
Respondents were asked how important specific industry trends would be to them in the future. The ability to measure customer satisfaction accurately was, as in previous years, usually rated the highest, and a solution provider who can offer a quick and cost-effective way of measuring customer satisfaction and linking it to changes in profit should win a lot of business.
There was also a wide acknowledgment that business processes would have to change, and the work that the contact centre does will need to be more closely coupled with the back office and also the wider business. This was felt especially strongly by the respondents which kick off a great many back office processes through their work in the contact centre.
The author is a Softigator member. You can contact him directly to ask questions or to comment on this article. Click on "search" in the member area and contact the author. You are also invited to comment on this article at service@softigator.net.
The UK Contact Centre Operational Review (5th edition – 2007) can be downloaded at www.contactbabel-downloads.com. info@contactbabel.com.
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14.02.2008
The UK Contact Centre Operational Review (2007) - IP and Call Handling
By Steve Morrell.
The figures from this year’s survey point to the use of IP within the contact centre 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 centre industry’s future.
The mantra “evolution, not revolution” has been pushed by telephony vendors, encouraging contact centres 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 (17%) using pure IP within their contact centres.
Current use of IP within the contact centre
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Proportion of respondents
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Pure IP Infrastructure
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17%
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Hybrid IP and TDM Infrastructure
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28%
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No VoIP
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40%
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Don't know
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15%
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Respondents expect the use IP to increase from 17% today to 41% 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 centre 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, although the no.1 reason is that it has been a corporate-wide decision to move to IP.
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 the flexibility to add and change agents quickly, with many also experiencing greater interoperability between systems.
The author is a Softigator member. You can contact him directly to ask questions or to comment on this article. Click on "search" in the member area and contact the author. You are also invited to comment on this article at service@softigator.net.
The UK Contact Centre Operational Review (5th edition – 2007) can be downloaded at www.contactbabel-downloads.com. info@contactbabel.com.
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14.02.2008
The UK Contact Centre Operational Review (2007) - Multimedia
By Steve Morrell.
79% of this year’s respondents deal with customer email within their contact centre. Text chat and web collaboration have a minor role in the overall scheme of things, but these are found in a small minority of contact centres which tend to use them quite a lot: email is much more widespread, especially in the IT and Transport & Travel sectors.
Vertical market
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Percentage of interactions that are email
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IT
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26.5%
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Transport and Travel
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12.3%
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Retail and Distribution
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7.0%
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Services
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6.6%
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Outsourcing
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5.4%
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Finance
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4.5%
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Telecoms
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4.4%
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Public Sector
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1.8%
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Average
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6.1%
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Respondents report that, in an ideal world, 23% of their interactions would be through email, rather than the 6.1% that it is on average today. Of the vertical markets surveyed, none had reached this goal, although IT and transport & travel were quite close. Interestingly, despite varying levels of email today, the general desire seems to be for around 15-25% of interactions to be via email.
13% of respondents give themselves an hour to answer customers’ emails (this does not include sending auto-replies saying the issue is being looked at). A further 36% of respondents say that they try to answer within a working day, with 40% of respondents setting themselves targets of longer than a day. As a rule, these targets are less ambitious than the ones which US contact centres set themselves.
There is a very important reason that email generally plays a distant second fiddle to telephony, and that is because 81% of emails are answered manually by an agent, with no assistance from an email management solution linked to a knowledge base, which could help get through the volumes of email, and provide consistent responses.
The author is a Softigator member. You can contact him directly to ask questions or to comment on this article. Click on "search" in the member area and contact the author. You are also invited to comment on this article at service@softigator.net.
The UK Contact Centre Operational Review (5th edition – 2007) can be downloaded at www.contactbabel-downloads.com. info@contactbabel.com.
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13.02.2008
The UK Contact Centre Operational Review (2007) - Flexible Working
By Steve Morrell.
Although many contact centres still operate in the same way in which most were originally set-up – a single, centralised site – there are increasing pressures within the industry to look at alternative ways of working, such as using virtual contact centres, or encouraging homeworking.
Of the 42% of respondents who indicated that they had more than one UK contact centre location, 56% of these respondents linked them together (at least in part) to benefit from economies of scale and other virtual contact centre benefits.
Type of multi-site operation
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Proportion of respondents
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|---|
Virtual
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50%
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Stand-alone
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38%
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Mix of virtual and stand-alone
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6%
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Don't know
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6%
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Note: only the 42% of respondents with more than one contact centre site were considered.
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Respondents with virtual contact centres were generally pleased with the gains in efficiency and service level that they have experienced. The ability to smooth out call spikes by moving them between contact centres, and the reduced wait times were particularly mentioned, although all of the potential virtual contact centre benefits mentioned were rated positively.
Only 3% of this year’s respondents were using any homeworking at all, and overall, only 0.13% of agent positions in this survey were based at home. As comparison, US figures show that 22% of contact centres were using some form of homeworking, with 3.2% of agent jobs in the industry being based at home, amounting to around 100,000 home-based agent positions.
The author is a Softigator member. You can contact him directly to ask questions or to comment on this article. Click on "search" in the member area and contact the author. You are also invited to comment on this article at service@softigator.net.
The UK Contact Centre Operational Review (5th edition – 2007) can be downloaded at www.contactbabel-downloads.com. info@contactbabel.com.
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13.02.2008
The UK Contact Centre Operational Review (2007) - Location
By Steve Morrell.
Over 3% of the UK’s employed population are now employed in contact centres. The importance of the contact centre industry to the northern parts of the UK is well-known: the North-West, North-East, Scotland and Yorkshire have well over 4% of their employed population working in the contact centre industry. The contact centre industry is relatively less important to East Anglia, London and the South-West.
The following table shows the cumulative self-ratings that the respondents gave to their regions, along with the number of times that the region was self-rated above-average in each of the seven categories. It seems as though respondents in Northern Ireland and the East Midlands are currently most satisfied with their situation. Those respondents in East Anglia and the South-West are the least happy on average. However, no weighting has been applied to these figures, meaning that the level of RDA support received is taken as being as important as the availability of skilled staff or their cost-effectiveness, which is almost certainly not the case.
Region
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Cumulative score
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Number of categories in which region was rated above average
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|---|
Northern Ireland
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42.0
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6
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East Midlands
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36.3
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7
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North-East
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36.3
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5
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London
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34.1
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4
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West Midlands
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33.5
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5
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Wales
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31.9
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5
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Scotland
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31.3
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4
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Yorkshire
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30.2
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3
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South-East
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28.1
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1
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South-West
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26.8
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2
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East Anglia
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24.2
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1
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Average
|
30.3
|
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NB: cumulative scores were calculated by adding the scores from 10 for staff cost-effectiveness, quality, transport, RDA support, availability of suitable buildings and future expansion potential, and subtracting the score for staff competition. Results do not include the actual importance of each category to the contact centre industry and should be read as such.
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The author is a Softigator member. You can contact him directly to ask questions or to comment on this article. Click on "search" in the member area and contact the author. You are also invited to comment on this article at service@softigator.net.
The UK Contact Centre Operational Review (5th edition – 2007) can be downloaded at www.contactbabel-downloads.com. info@contactbabel.com.
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