330億美元座位的時代

The age of the $33 billion seat

Are organisations getting the best returns on contact centre seats?

Kuala Lumpur, 23 August 2007 – New research from Datacraft/DimensionData Group 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 managementcosts. When applied to an estimated 6.5 million contact centre seatsworldwide, this translates to an investment of USD 33 billion.

These results from the Datacraft/Dimension Data Global Contact CentreBenchmarking Report 2007, which surveyed some 400 contact centreslocated across 42 countries out of which 14% are based in Asia Pacific,underscore the need for management to ensure greater productivity andeffectiveness from contact centre resources.

The Report also reveals that the challenge for today’s organizations isto have a contact centre that builds relationships and understandscustomer profiles, while at the same time, reduces the overall cost ofcustomer interactions through operational efficiencies.

Karina Majid, General Manager of Customer Interactive Solutions,Datacraft Asia, comments: “The objective for executives and contactcentre management is to ensure that organisations get the best return oninvestment for both business and customers. Two key levers they canfocus on to achieve this are call resolution and automation.”

The Report indicates a drop in the percentage of calls resolved by thefirst agent over the past three years: from 82.1% in the 2005 Report to80.7% in 2006 and 69.8% this year. Also, contact centre agents spendaround 60% of their time speaking to customers, responding to e-mailsand handling queries. These two findings are concerning: 40% of theinvestment made in agent seats is not directly linked to customerinteraction and when it is, only seven out of ten calls are resolved bythe first agent.

“Unresolved calls frustrate customers and cost organisations money. Ifcompanies improve call resolution and agent utilisation, contact centreeffectiveness can be substantially improved,” says Majid.

The second lever is automation, which is widely regarded as a criticalstrategy for contact centres. The 2007 Report highlights that automatingprocesses or parts of processes is the top re-engineering andimprovement priority for contact centres (54.9%). But a word of warning:keep top of mind that processes determine the ‘how’ of contact centreoperation.
“Many organisations focus on process automation and overlook theinescapable fact that automating a poorly defined or executed processwill not improve the situation. Having the right information at theright time can help reduce call lengths and increase first callresolution. Using self-service intelligently can also assist in reducingthe volume of repetitive non-value tasks that agents perform and cancontribute much to improving productivity and hence reducing operationalexpenditure,” says Majid.

With contact centre volumes increasing across channels – includingemail, Interactive Voice Responses(IVR) self-service and onlineself-service –, automation of ordinary tasks is increasingly beingadopted by organisations and currently, 13.5% of contact centres usespeech recognition.

“Success rates with voice-driven self-service have also improved, withcompletion rates on self-service continuing to climb – 19% compoundgrowth on last year – across the board,” concludes Majid.