1to1 Magazine - November/December 2008 - (Page 29) GLOBAL TRENDS Comment mai-je vous aider? May|s nas|l yard|m BEN mi? Bagaimana bisa membantu anda? Global view Contact center agents and managers around the world are being asked to balance often conflicting expectations of customer centricity and efficiency. Additionally, many C-level executives expect their contact center managers to transform their operations from cost centers to profit centers. “Call centers really have to provide a good ROI investment these days,” says Dave Stamm, president and CEO of Enkata. This is a common theme, according to Grant Sainsbury, practice director for customer interactive solutions at Dimension Data, which recently released its “10th Annual Global Contact Center Benchmarking Report.” “There’s a lot of focus around building customer relationships out to the contact center,” he says. Consequently, there is an increase in the number of organizations across the globe rethinking the role of the contact center agent. “Today we see contact centers a lot more as a career,” Sainsbury says. “In 1997 it was more of a job.” Another common global shift is the growing prevalence of such technologysupported solutions as IP-based communications, hosted and SaaS service applications, remote agents, CRM integration, multichannel coordination, and service via SMS, email, and video—all due in part not only to the growing availability of the supporting technologies, but also because of the potential to lower costs while improving service. Additionally, Sainsbury says, “there is significantly more use of speech recognition.” Social networking is also affecting contact centers globally. David Dentry, general manager of technical support at Nikon Americas, says that because of the instant global feedback of social media, if a Chinese customer calls a Chinese call center about a new offer and posts that response online, and then a Canadian customer sees that and calls a Canadian center for the same offer, that can cause a backlash and could be detrimental to the brand. With the help of RightNow Technologies, Nikon maintains a central repository of information and carefully coordinates the release of that information to each of its call centers—in Canada, China, the Dominican Republic, Ireland, Europe, Japan, and the United States. A centralized technical office in Japan manages the root data, produces localized training material from it, and distributes it in 24 languages around the world. “Our customers have high expectations of our products, so we have to educate the agents,” Dentry says. Along with these global trends are the many localized challenges and opportunities facing contact center operations. While service operations in the United States work to balance costs and service levels, Europe- and Africa-based contact centers are harnessing the opportunities afforded them by high levels of IP adoption, and Asian and Indian centers are battling rapidly rising costs. The United States balances costs with service U.S. companies have vastly different approaches to managing the costs associated with delivering customer service— especially in today’s environment of rising customer expectations. But one increasingly common approach is to anticipate customers’ needs and respond accordingly. “A lot of companies want to service customers in the way they want to be served,” says Elizabeth Herrell, vice president and analyst at Forrester Research. Multichannel self-service, therefore, is also moving to the forefront. This helps www.1to1media.com November/December 2008 29 https://www.ccbenchmarking.com/Benchmarks/ExecutiveSummaryReport2008.htm#TOTOP http://www.1to1media.com
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