ICMI's Customer Management Insight - September 2007 - (Page 35) O P E R AT I O N S But these are just terms. Terms do not make a multichannel contact center better. What does is learning about key practices, tactics, tools and challenges carried out by and faced by other centers striving for success in the highly competitive and increasingly complex customer contact arena. Contact centers are perennially asked to do more with less — a significant challenge, especially considering the fact that customer demands and contact options keep expanding. So how are contact centers responding, and how have they improved over the past several years in this regard? That’s just what we at ICMI aimed to uncover when we conducted our third comprehensive study on multichannel contact center management a few months ago. More than 600 contact center professionals working in centers of all sizes and shapes around the globe participated in the study, sharing critical information about how cleanly their centers are clearing the multichannel hurdles that lie in their path. Following are some of the major findings from the study. KEY FINDINGS (83.9 percent) handle customer email transactions. Two in three of these centers (67.8 percent) have an email response time objective of 24 hours or less. Only 43.7 percent of them have an email response management system in place to enhance email routing, tracking and reporting. > Most centers (70.1 percent) currently handle customer fax transactions, though nearly half 10.9 percent in a similar study that we conducted in 2005) > Click-to-talk Web calls remain rare in contact centers: only 6 percent of centers surveyed currently handle such contacts (up slightly from 4.3 percent in 2005). > For every contact channel, the majority of respondents reported either no change or an increase in contact volume. The channels showing the most growth over the previ- In most multichannel centers, traditional phone calls continue to comprise the bulk of the workload, but that does not mean that centers can become lax about how quickly and effectively they handle all other contacts. receive fewer than 500 faxes per month. Only 88.3 percent of these centers have an automated fax-back system in place. > Just over half (55.4 percent) of centers support a Web self-service application, with the most common features of these apps being FAQs, customer access to personal accounts, help options, and a knowledgebase/search engine. > Only half (50.2 percent) of centers currently handle IVR calls that require no live agent assistance. > Web chat in contact centers appears to have plateaued — 15 percent of centers surveyed this year currently handle chat transactions, compared to 15.6 percent in the 2005 study. However, more centers today (58.4 percent vs. 50 percent) have their chat agents use Web collaboration tools during sessions with customers. > Web callback transactions have yet to take off either — with just 9.3 percent of centers handling such contacts (down slightly from ous 12 months are phone (live agent), email and Web self-service. > The majority of respondents (56.7 percent) feel that workforce management in the multichannel environment is either “much more” or “somewhat more” challenging than it is in a traditional call center environment. This is down from 66.6 percent in the 2005 study. > Only 29.4 percent of respondents reported having a multiple contact management system in place in their center. > Top recruiting and hiring practices respondents use to ensure that their center is staffed with qualified multichannel agents include using the Web more when recruiting, assessing candidates’ general writing skills, and screening candidates early based on email/chat skills and general Web savvy (see Figure 1 on page 36). > Contact centers are doing a decent job of measuring how satisfied traditional callers are, but not how satisfied are customers who contact the center via other key | SEPTEMBER 2007 > The vast majority of respondents (89.7 percent) work in centers that handle phone calls (handled by live agents and/or IVR) and at least one of the following contact types: email, chat, Web calls/callbacks and fax. > More than a third (34.9 percent) of centers surveyed do not measure the first-contact resolution rate for calls handled by live agents, despite FCR being considered one of the most critical KPIs by many experts. Nearly one-half (47.5 percent) of centers fail to measure FCR for their email contacts. > More than four in five centers icmi’s insight www.icmi.com 35 http://www.icmi.com
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