ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008 - (Page 30)

INDUSTRYResearch Reports from the U.K. and the Middle East Reveal Insights about the Use and Potential of Contact Center Technology U.K. CONTACT CENTERS NEGLECT MULTIMEDIA WFM While most contact centers use some type of workforce management (WFM) solution to measure adherence to schedule and for “what-if” scenarios, few use them to manage multimedia tasks, such as email and text-chat. According to a recent study of 211 U.K. contact centers by ContactBabel, 74 percent of participants use WFM applications to measure schedule adherence and 68 percent use them to develop “whatif” scenarios, while only 29 percent use WFM tools to schedule multimedia tasks. This “adds to the evidence that the multimedia channel is the first to suffer in a contact center’s busy times, which does not help the customer acceptance of the channel, ” states The U.K. Contact Centre Operational Review. The types of WFM tools most often used by participants included third-party applications (55 percent) and spreadsheets (46 percent). Another 18 percent said they rely on their inhouse WFM team or contact center management to develop forecasts and schedules. Seven percent said that they don’t use any type of WFM solution. “One of the reasons that the proportion of the multimedia interactions has hardly risen in the past five years is underinvestment in technology to route and handle such requests, says Steve Morrell, the report’s ” author. “However, another major inhibitor to multimedia take-up is that most contact centers are not giving their agents sufficient time to deal with non-telephony work. The result is that emails are being ignored or icmi’s insight answered too late, with these disappointed customers either ringing the contact center with their request or going elsewhere entirely with their business. Contact centers should be forecasting their multimedia workload and scheduling agent time accordingly, otherwise they might as well not bother offering an alternate channel to traditional telephony. ” Source: The UK Contact Centre Operational Review, is available from ContactBabel, www.contactbabel.com THE MIDDLE EAST: A CONTACT CENTER TECHNOLOGICAL HAVEN The Middle East represents enormous opportunities for contact center vendors and investors, according to The Middle East: Bringing Vendors to the Contact Center Mountain, a new report from Datamonitor. Despite geopolitical unrest in the region, a thriving economy, along with a rising focus on customer service, has created a fertile environment for vendors. The oil industry has increased economic growth in the area and purchasing power per capita has surged, the report says. Furthermore, more companies in the region are looking to contact center operations to meet increasing customer demand and to provide improved customer service. The Middle East is a thriving market where contact center technologies will experience significant growth through 2012, the report states. Datamonitor supplies the following reasons for the significant increase in contact center technologies within the region: > The spread of a global economy represents a strong growth opportunity for vendors; www.icmi.com | JANUARY 2008 30 http://www.contactbabel.com http://www.icmi.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008

ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008 Contents Customer Care Technologies Ad Index Editor's Page Contact Center Spotlight People: Prehire Tests In The Center Strategy: Video Contact Centers Show Preview Operations: Knowledge Management Industry Research Contact Centers Face Today's Realities: A Case for Consolidation 2.0 Is Your Agent Training Process Evolving with the Role? The Key to Innovation Is Maintaining Your Strengths Becoming Strategic: Using Customer Contact Analytics to Empower the Contact Center's Role

ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008

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