Trends in the Contact Center (part 1)

So, Diane has turned the blog over to me (Gary Wirth) for the next few posts. As promised, I am going to address Trends in the Contact Center in 2009.

Before we talk about the actual Trends, however, it’s important for us to level-set and understand the factors we believe are driving these trends.

It’s probably simplest to break down the drivers into 4 components:
· External (or customers)
· Internal (or front-line agents)
· Management
· Outside Influences


From an external or customer perspective, there is a generational shift going on in how your customers desire to interact with you. There is an increase in younger customers who are experienced in multi-modal communications such as social networking. They are perfectly comfortable with an independent interaction such as self-service. Meanwhile, there is also an increase in older customers (many times they’re long standing customers) who desire to have a more traditional service experience.

A common issue that we see in the Contact Center is around expectations. Senior Executives will often times dictate a reduction in operational expenses. Many times the easiest way to achieve these savings is by providing automated self service to your customers. Well, self service is good in many cases, but the value must be weighed against the loss of personal contact. There are some cases where automation can bring increased revenue while providing decreased costs (one example is in the collections arena). However, I’m sure that we have all witnessed the self-service nightmares in our roles as consumers. There are even websites (http://www.gethuman.com/) that are dedicated to helping customers manipulate systems to get to a live agent. By the way, take a look at that website to see if your company is listed!

The second perspective is with internal or front-line employees. These “Generation Y” employees are demanding the same technology at work that they can purchase as consumers (ex. Skype or Video, Instant Messaging). There are also skill-set differences; many of these employees have expanded ability to instant message and web chat, but with diminished skills at formal letter writing.

Management expectations are the third driver of Contact Center trends. Many firms are still measuring customer satisfaction the same way that they did in the past. These measurements may not accurately reflect your customers’ experience. In addition, the management teams at many of these same contact centers are expecting increased customer service efficiencies and additional sales, at the same time that they are limiting spending on customer service technology. The mandate from senior management, especially in budget-tightening cycles, is to cut back on expenses, and often the Contact Center is viewed as an expense center.

Contact Center managers must do a better job of selling the value of their organization to the firm, and to senior management. They need to convert the impact of a successful customer interaction into terms that management can understand – hard dollar revenue to the firm.

Think about these two statements and decide who you would give budget to. “Our customer satisfaction index is 80%; by decreasing the Average Speed of Answer to 10 seconds, we can increase customer satisfaction to 90%”. Or, “If we add self service for password resets, we will decrease our operational costs by $1 million. We also expect that we will increase revenue by $3 million because the agents will be freed up to spend more time with customers up selling our products”.

I know this is easier to say than to actually calculate; however, my point here is that you need to do a better job explaining what customer service means in terms of revenue or cost savings to the company.

Finally, let’s discuss outside influences. The economy has to be considered the biggest issue facing contact centers. Based on the economic factors, most firms are requiring hard dollar savings and a faster ROI before making any commitments to projects. In order for Contact Center Managers to secure budget for any technology that can help them, they must translate their project outcome to revenue generation or operational efficiencies. These results can sometimes be difficult to calculate (see example above!).

So, now that we’ve reviewed the Contact Center Drivers or Influences, we are ready to start discussing trends. In the next blog, we’ll examine the first three major trends we see in the Contact Center in 2009 -- Alternative Sourcing, Self Service, and Virtualization.