ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008 - (Page 34)

EXPERT’S ANGLE Table 1: If you have a virtual contact center, what benefits have you gained? Proportion of Respondents Mean Average Marking at 8, 9 (from 10) or 10 from 10 8.9 8.8 7.8 6.7 6.7 79% 83% 79% 56% 61% Benefits Gained from Implementing a Virtual Contact Center Ability to deal with peaks Fairer agent utilization/reduced wait times Greater flexibility on when agents are online Savings on call costs between sites Wider range of skills available to callers Table 2: If you have multiple U.S. contact centers, but have not virtualized them, why is this? Proportion of Respondents Mean Average Marking at 8, 9 (from 10) or 10 from 10 6.8 5.0 4.2 3.2 33% 40% 33% 0 Reason for Not Implementing a Virtual Contact Center Can’t see the business benefits Too expensive Concerned about team management Concerned about security Table 3: Respondents’ views on future homeworking Proportion of Respondents Expecting an Increase in Future Homeworking 55% 16% 0 14% 16% ized the operation, a failure to visualize the commercial benefits of doing so was stated to be the main reason for non-virtualization (see Table 2). A significant number of businesses also had serious concerns about expense: as with any investment, the cost is guaranteed but the savings are not. One-third of these respondents were also concerned that team management would be adversely Response Increase Remain constant Decrease Don’t know No answer affected if the team were not based at a single location. More than half of respondents believe that homeworking is on the way up, with none believing that it will decrease (see Table 3). Interestingly, among those using some homeworking now, 91 percent said that they would be using more. Of those which have not yet trialed homeworking, only 43 percent said that they believed homeworking would increase. The TMT (telecoms, media and technology), insurance and healthcare sectors were most upbeat about future homeworking. Consolidation 2.0 is coming to America. The U.S. contact center industry has many characteristics that support a strategic embrace of virtual contact center environments, including homeworking. It suffers from high levels of staff attrition, comprises tens of thousands of multisite contact center operations, occupies a large geographic area, and has access to exceptional levels of technology, telecoms and implementation ability. The widespread use of outsourcers — both domestic and offshore — means that there are further opportunities to run multiple site operations as a single entity, thus gaining from the massive economies of scale that many respondents state they have experienced. centers were generally very pleased with the gains in efficiency and service level they experienced. High-ranking benefits were reduced call wait times and the ability to smooth out call spikes by moving them between contact centers. All of the potential virtual contact center benefits mentioned, however, were rated positively (see Table 1). Of the 37 percent of multisite respondents who had not virtualicmi’s insight • Steve Morrell is Principal Analyst at Contact Babel. www.contactbabel.com | JANUARY 2008 www.icmi.com 34 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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