Benchmarking Report 2011 Overview

 

Dimension Data's Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report 2011 is a market research report that provides in-depth information on contact centres - their inner workings, actual performance (on over 350 performance metrics) and likely future development.

 

As a renowned contact centre systems integrator, Dimension Data has drawn upon its considerable experience and expertise to provide you with in-depth analysis of this year’s findings, as well as additional expert commentary that explains the research and expands on future trends.

 

In keeping with our proven approach, this year’s Report follows the format of a reference guide allowing easy access to the information via chart or table format, accompanied by specific commentary and a chapter summary in short bullet point format.

 

The 2011 Report findings are drawn from six key business areas including:

• Strategy and Development

• Operations

• Customer Interaction

• Self-service

• Workforce Optimisation

• Technology

Introduction to the 2011 Report

 

Welcome

This year we are delighted to report that we have increased our global reach to 66 countries, and that record participation levels achieved in 2009 have been maintained at 546 respondents overall, covering all centre sizes and sector types. This is testament to the fact that our industry is increasingly seeking answers to both perennial and new questions.

 

Emerging Themes

Taking the lead – the role of the contact centre in business

As the Report title suggests, contact centres are assuming a more prominent role in overall management of customer interaction across the business.

 

Whether it’s through increased deliverables on multi-channel solution sets, or by assuming greater responsibility in shaping overarching business strategies, contact centres have never been more important to the success of the organisation.

 

The rapid adoption of personalised mobile and smartphone devices, along with the proliferation of social media activity, are dramatically influencing consumer contact behaviours and stand out as key themes in the 2011 Report.

 

Contact centres are evolving into enterprise wide customer management businesses; Self-service channels are enabling customer choice and the organization is now more focused on improving service than cost reduction.

 

IP is changing the technology landscape and is pivotal to releasing access to emerging developments including cloud solutions – the fastest growing trend as organisations recognize the cost and flexibility benefits.

 

We believe that the Report provides a path towards better understanding of today’s benchmarks and are confident that the insights it provides will deliver tangible value to your business.

Highlights of the 2011 Report

 

Major themes and findings

 

Strategy and development

Social media and web chat on the rise

Contact centres are still primarily focused on managing telephone and e-mail channels, but the new appearance of social media this year shows nearly a fifth are already managing social media interactions, with more planning to do so over the next two years. We expect to see more than half of centres adopting web chat and anticipate that web chat and instant messaging will become more integrated.

 

More focus on efficiency

Increased Efficiency is this year’s top commercial driver for contact centres, while Improve Service is still ranked higher than any other driver across the board. At the same time we see an increased focus on customer satisfaction and specifically Net Promoter Scores (NPS) TM *, a positive indicator that more attention will be placed on growing the value of existing customers.

 

Operations

Using management information (MI) to add value to customer engagement

As operational budgets come under pressure, sales targets will rise and demand management will be high on operational agendas, along with improving the quality of the customer and employee experience. This will mean agents will need more freedom to engage with customers in a more natural way, and intelligent MI about customers will help add value to the conversation, and enable them to identify and explore sales opportunities.

 

Contact growth is highest across non-telephony channels

Growth in multi-channel contacts continues to exceed the growth in phone-based contacts, and organisations will develop greater operational expertise and technology solutions to reduce response times. There is a growing trend towards measuring costs, most noticeably for non-telephony channels. While more respondents are measuring costs across multiple channels, it is surprising that organisations are still not doing this as a matter of course.

 

Customer interaction management

Customer segmentation practices still not being understood

Around a third of contact centres have no customer segmentation model in place. While this doesn’t vary significantly based on centre size, we do see particular industries more likely to adopt a segmentation approach. At the same time, it is interesting to see that one of the most mature regions has the lowest adoption of customer segmentation.

 

Back to basics for first contact resolution

Advisor Knowledge has remained the number one ranked factor to positively and negatively impact first contact resolution (FCR). This is followed closely by Systems / Information Access and Agent Listening and Comprehension Skills. However in some industries (most notably Financial Services) the need for end-to-end processes is highlighted as being second only to Advisor Knowledge when it comes to having a positive impact on FCR.

 

More ownership and accountability required when it comes to hand-offs

In results that were similar to those of the 2009 report, respondents stated they had the capability to track and view the status of all enquiries handed off within the centre or other business areas. It is concerning that two of the largest and most mature industries (Financial Services and Service Providers) scored quite badly in their capability to track hand-offs compared to the overall average. This indicates a negative continuation in terms of a lack of ownership and accountability – which we know from consumer feedback, is one of the biggest causes of frustration with contact centres.

 

Self-service

Customer satisfaction replaces cost reduction as top self-service driver

Results show an emerging desire by providers to improve telephony self-service, and a shift in focus and greater emphasis on improving customer satisfaction – replacing cost reduction as the top priority consideration for self-service deployments.

 

Large imbalance in measuring self-service user satisfaction

A low level of management information tracking the customer experience of automated services shows there is a clear opportunity for improvement. Nearly a third of centres don’t even measure interactive voice response (IVR) customer feedback, and astounding is the high proportion that don’t believe they can claim any sort of competitive advantage based upon their self-service capability.

 

Integration is the key to a consistent customer experience

Only a quarter of web and telephony systems are integrated, which is impacting on the delivery of a more consistent customer experience through improved agent access to detailed customer profile information. The high number of organisations with no integration between their web and telephony systems seems to be linked to the relative immaturity of the industry and region.

 

Workforce optimisation

Load balancing still not common practice

Load balancing is still not common practice for just over two thirds of respondents. Despite the fact that close to this amount have more than one contact centre, only about half of these load balance between centres. Larger operations and those that have ‘follow-the-sun’ strategies appear to be better positioned to load balance.

 

Homeworking growing in popularity

Homeworking is on the rise across every region. The US has the largest proportion of homeworkers, the number doubling since 2009, while Asia-Pacific has overtaken Australia and New Zealand, to occupy second place. The number of homeworking agents in Europe has tripled, while the number in Africa and Middle East has seen a small rise, perhaps an indicator of technology improvements and fewer bandwidth issues. The Technology sector uses the most homeworkers, while Consumer Goods and Retail and Financial Services use them the least.

 

Staff turnover – a costly exercise

This year’s results reflect an overall annual staff turnover of over a third, a significant deterioration since the last Report, and perhaps somewhat explained by industry-wide cutbacks over the period. For any contact centre finding itself in a growth period, the challenge of replacing over a third of its staff per year, as well as having to find new staff, can be serious and costly in terms of the loss of knowledge and experience.

 

Technology

Enterprise-wide technology upgrades on the rise

Upgrades of contact centre technology have increased significantly and show that technology advances have matured to a level where many have identified the business benefits of such upgrades. Contact centres need a very specific focus and strategy when it comes to their applications – where decisions about technology are very specific to the contact centre’s business objectives.

 

How new channels are changing technologies

As channels evolve, so too will technologies. This means organisations will have to continually review them and work with leading vendors to keep abreast of new developments. At the same time we expect more cloud providers to emerge with offerings of very specific, highly complex Applications-as-a-Service (XaaS) options, which will better enable contact centres to keep up with developments.

 

IP pivotal to unlocking cloud service opportunities

Cloud services for contact centres continue to grow as organisations explore their advantages to the wider business. The introduction of IP into the contact centre is pivotal to ensuring technology becomes cloud based and gives cloud providers the ability to provision contact centre infrastructures that are reliable, flexible and cost effective.

Benchmarking Summary Report

The Benchmarking Summary Report presents a preview of some of the key findings contained within the Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report. This 16 page summary aims to give you an idea of key trends and findings from the survey and contains key highlights and themes from this year's results.

 

The Summary Report is by no means exhaustive. If you would like the full Benchmarking Report, please place your order.

 

Download your copy of the Benchmarking Summary Report 2011.