1to1 Magazine - November/December 2008 - (Page 32) Asia/Pacific fights rising costs “[In Eastern Europe] customer service and loyalty will be major leaders for the future and the direction of the good companies.” high gas prices, increased agent retention, and a pool of more qualified candidates who want to work at home. While the number of home-based agents continues to grow, so does the need for the tools to support them. Forrester Research’s 2008 survey of contact center executives found that IP adoption continues to expand across the globe; more than 30 percent of companies indicated they have deployed or are rolling out IP contact centers. Forrester attributes the surge to the ease of using IP to support agents across the network. According to Mark King, senior vice president of Aspect’s European and African sales, contact centers in Africa and Eastern Europe are rapidly migrating to IP-based unified communications. Many of these centers are ahead of their U.K. and Western European counterparts, where the technology is more mature, so transitioning to IP presents a complete technology change. “The infrastructure is fresh there,” he says. “They haven’t gotten any legacy preconceptions or systems.” Additionally, businesses in Eastern Europe are in the beginning stages of becoming customer centric. Jan Safka, senior head of voice and mobile service at T-Mobile Czechoslovakia, says the notion of focusing on customer service is definitely changing in Eastern Europe. “People who grew up in socialistic times were not used to someone helping them,” he says. “This is changing. Young people are coming in and getting used to the service culture.” As a result, T-Mobile Czechoslovakia’s customer service is transitioning to a crosssell/upsell environment. To support that strategy the company is using targeted marketing, giving customers channel preference, and implementing speech recognition. “It’s about knowing the customer and having field data in the call center and smart marketing so that you can try to help the customer,” Safka adds. “[In Eastern Europe] customer service and loyalty will be major leaders for the future and the direction of the good companies.” Ch-ch-changes Dimension Data’s recent “Contact Center Global Benchmarking Report” shows 10-year comparisons across a variety of metrics. Here, a sample of the findings. 1997 Percentage of calls answered in less than 10 seconds Average percentage of calls abandoned (in agent queues) First-call resolution rate Average speed to answer Average wait time until call abandoned Percentage agent turnover moving to another role within the organization Percentage annual agent attrition rate 72% 6% 83% 23 secs 53 secs 10% 14% 2007 63.5% 13.6% 81% 39 secs 45 secs 13% 27% Change -11.8% 126.7% -2.4% 69.6% -15.1% 30.0% 92.9% Hosting contact centers in Asia was long thought to be a highly cost-effective option. Today, there are so many outsourced contact centers there that competition among them is driving up the cost of labor. “The game of outsourcing calls is always about chasing cheap labor,” Verint’s Durr explains. “With the dollar falling, the difference in savings is somewhat diminished. Coupled with a high exchange rate, the offshoring drive has been reduced.” Unfortunately, there isn’t much that can be done about this, Durr says. “When you ask a person to work in the middle of the night and thereby disassociate themselves from the rest of their family and society, you had better be prepared to pay a premium. That’s what’s happening.” Contact centers in Asia need to keep pace with the customer-centric approaches centers elsewhere around the world are embracing, but the reality is that cost control is still the main focus for many contact center managers in the region. “These centers have basic technologies in house—they have call recording and they may or may not have workforce management—but they’re not using sophisticated technologies like speech analytics,” Durr says. “They simply don’t believe there’s a value proposition. It takes a leap of faith to say, ‘I’m going to invest serious money in speech analytics or customer survey feedback mechanisms.’ “They’re all fighting costs, [yet] all are concerned with customer service,” he adds. “For ages and ages, there was no concept of customer service in China. There is now. They’re a modern society and worry about the same kinds of things that a manager in Hoboken, NJ, worries about.” Wherever they may be based, contact centers that can balance service and efficiency will deliver a competitive advantage. The globalization of those centers can help to build collaboration among farflung centers, improving both service and efficiency. In other words, globalization can not only support customer centricity, it can help improve it in a cost-effective and profitable manner. 32 1to1 magazine www.1to1media.com https://www.ccbenchmarking.com/Benchmarks/ExecutiveSummaryReport2008.htm#TOTOP http://www.1to1media.com
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