Johannesburg, South Africa
New research released has reveals that organisations spend some USD 5,000 per month per agent seat to provide customer service through their contact centres. This includes staff, technology and other facilities and management costs. When applied to an estimated 6.5 million contact centre seats worldwide, this translates to an investment of USD 33 billion.
These results from Dimension Data's Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report 2007, which surveyed 403 contact centres located across 42 countries, underscore the need for management to ensure greater productivity and effectiveness from contact centre resources.
Cara Diemont, editor of the Report comments: "The challenge for executives and contact centre management is to ensure that organisations get the best return on investment for both business and customers. Two key levers they can focus on to achieve this are call resolution and automation."
The Report indicates a drop in the percentage of calls resolved by the first agent over the past three years: from 82.1% in the 2005 Report to 80.7% in 2006 and 69.8% this year. Also, contact centre agents spend around 60% of their time speaking to customers, responding to e-mails and handling queries. These two findings are concerning: 40% of the investment made in agent seats is not directly linked to customer interaction and when it is, only seven out of ten calls are resolved by the first agent.
"Unresolved calls frustrate customers and cost organisations money. If companies improve call resolution and agent utilisation, contact centre effectiveness can be substantially improved," says Diemont.
The second lever is automation, which is widely regarded as a critical strategy for contact centres. The 2007 Report highlights that automating processes or parts of processes is the top re-engineering and improvement priority for contact centres (54.9%). But a word of warning: keep top of mind that processes determine the 'how' of contact centre operation.
"Many organisations focus on process automation and overlook the inescapable fact that automating a poorly defined or executed process will not improve the situation," says Diemont.
Self-service is an automation strategy that is increasingly being adopted by organisations. Currently, 13.5% of contact centres use speech recognition while a quarter plan to implement it.
"Success rates with voice-driven self-service have also improved, with completion rates on self-service continuing to climb - 19% compound growth on last year - across the board," concludes Diemont.
About Dimension Data
Dimension Data plc (LSE:DDT), a specialist IT services and solution provider, helps clients plan, build and support their IT infrastructures. Dimension Data applies its expertise in networking, security, operating environments, storage and contact centre technologies and its unique skills in consulting, integration and managed services to create customised client solutions.
www.dimensiondata.com
About the Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report
First published in the UK in 1997 by Merchants, Dimension Data's specialist contact centre outsourcing and operations division, this year's edition is the ninth in a series of the industry-renowned benchmarking reports. The report has balanced global and industry representation from 403 contact centres located across 42 countries and five continents, and is an invaluable reference for all contact centre professionals. It provides managers with a set of best practice standards and benchmarks, including staffing and training, performance metrics, technology usage, budgets and development plans. The report is researched and published by Dimension Data. For more information about the Report, please go to www.ccbenchmarking.com
CONTACT: Dimension Data Hilary King Tel: +27 11 575 6728 Cell: +27 82 414 9623 Fax: +27 11 576 6728 hilary.king@za.didata.com
Source: Business Wire (Business Wire India)