With the increase in the number of PC users worldwide, the need for user support, through effective contact centres, has once again surfaced as a spotlight issue within the ICT arena.
To shed some light on current trends within this sector, Dimension Data has released the findings of its seventh Merchants Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report - a survey spanning 166 contact centres across 24 countries on five continents.
According to Mike Fairon, national practice manager at Dimension Data customer interactive solutions, the report highlights a number of key trends which are of concern to the growth of contact centre business. Cutting costs, however, remains the overall constant, and most important, concern of them all.
Says Fairon: "We have found that customers are abandoning calls at an alarming rate, because they are not prepared to wait to be assisted indefinitely." According to him customers are now only prepared to wait 65 seconds, compared to the 72 seconds that they waited last year. The report states that call abandonment has risen for the third year in a row, and now stands at a staggering 13,3 percent of calls.
This, says Fairon, is due to companies focusing on cost-cutting rather than service delivery to drive the contact centre"s growth. The report found that 48 percent of respondents say that cost reduction and increasing efficiency are their main commercial drivers.
"Companies and management need to realise that contact centres should not be regarded as cost centres anymore, but rather take note of the fact that cost centres can be profit drivers as part of the business, and assist in revenue generation," he adds.
"Happy customers return" will become a true statement in this sense of the word.
Due to poor service delivery and long waiting times, self-help options are being favoured by customers. This is resulting in a substantial growth in Interactive Voice Response (IVR) or speech recognition (speech) technology implementation for contact centres. "Twenty per cent of customers are opting for self-help options, with speech recognition as a clear favourite," it says.
The report states that the latest trend towards self-service - speech - is predicted to grow by almost 180 percent. "Companies using speech recognition currently stand at 6 percent, with 17 percent of respondents planning to implement this technology over the next 12 months," it says.
Offshoring remains a key trend for companies with contact centres. "Half of respondents say that the decision to relocate their contact centres to an offshore location is primarily driven by access to skills," the report adds. The offshoring issue is also not freed from the overall attention to costs and remains under scrutiny of turning on dimes. The report revealed that an overwhelming 89 percent of respondents continue to cite decreased costs as the main reason, and perceived benefit, of an offshore contact centre.
Major concern
Forty-five per cent of respondents say that the availability of staff influences their decision as to where to establish their offshore contact centre and 35 percent say it is affected by the skills of staff. This, notes Fairon, suggests that quality of service is important to companies, and subsequently customer service, as a result. Over 56 percent of respondents noted quality of service as a major concern.
Another, negative trend, is that training for contact centre agents is falling by the wayside in favour of putting cost-cutting ahead of service delivery. Although 57 percent of global contact centres plan to increase their functional scope over the next two years, investment in training staff is expected to reduce. The report found that the length of agent induction training has drastically declined from 36 days (2003) to only 21 days at present.
Fairon stresses that: "As the scope of contact centres grows, the complexity of interactions with which agents deal increases, which means that they should get more training, not less." He notes that, in the majority of cases, the reason is because training investments are not aligned with business performance.
He continues by saying that customer service is being reviewed, and notes that tailored customer experiences are being addressed through providing multi-channel interactions via phone, e-mail, the Web etc. But, he says that organisations need to step up their efforts dramatically, like incorporating SMS more. Only 16 percent of centres have integrated it with other channels, according to the report, and 66 percent say they do not intend to do so at all. A thought that might spring to mind is that within the SA and African markets, where the use of cellular phones is growing at a fast pace, does ignoring this channel make sense?
Fairon further notes that with the deregulation of the local telecommunications industry, contact centres are going to be presented with major opportunities. The reasons being lower telecoms costs, both local and international, which is exactly what contact centres want.