The key findings of the research were:
- 62% of contact centre campaigns/projects are set up in under 3 weeks
- Most popular type of campaign being run was Customer Service (63.3%), followed by Telemarketing/Sales (36.7%)
- Phone is still the most frequently used communication channel for both inbound and outbound contact (used in over 70% of both inbound and outbound projects). Other channels included email, web contact forms, post and social media.
- When specialist campaign development software was used, 84% of organisations said that they found it easier to launch campaigns, while 57% said it was quicker to launch campaigns
- 85% of campaigns/projects involve agents using a formal or informal script – with IT personnel, in-house software developers and/or external software developers involved in the IT implementation of these scripts in 63% of cases.
- 43% of organisations use specialist project development software for developing agent desktops, scripting, designing reports etc.
- Managers and Supervisors receive historical campaign reports on call handling times in 70% of cases, agent wrap times in 65%, and callers in queue in 58%. The probability that Agents receive these metrics is 55.9%, 44.1% and 35.3% respectively.
- Cloud v. on-site technology On-site technology is still preferable with 78% of Call Recording/Quality Management applications, 66.7% of ACD/Call Handling systems and 53.8% of Performance Management technology respectively.
- However cloud-based apps were used for ACD/Call Handling (25.6%), Data/Speech Analytics (23%), Call Recording/Quality Management (17.9%) and Dialler technology (15.4%).
Our 2012 survey provides a rare insight into how organisations set up, manage and report on their contact centre campaigns says Carl Adkins, CEO, Infinity CCS. It reveals just how fast contact centres have to launch new campaigns as well as the breadth of modern contact centre campaigns from single channel inbound or outbound campaigns with limited reporting, right through to complex multichannel inbound/outbound campaigns that use campaign development software and deliver sophisticated real time and historic contact reports. The research also demonstrates the value of project/campaign development software in enabling organisations to launch campaigns easier and faster.
The uptake of cloud-based applications is also more conservative than might be imagined, showing that the majority of contact centre operations are still relying on premise-based technology especially for the likes of call recording, quality management and ACD/call handling. We expect cloud market share to increase as legacy investments reach end of life and cloud vendors prove themselves to wary contact centres.
We would like to sincerely thank all the organisations who took the time to participate in this years Contact Centre Campaign Survey.
The survey, designed and conducted by Infinity in conjunction with marketing consultancy, Gray Associates was conducted online; and promoted via leading industry web sites callcentrehelper.com and callcentre.co.uk as well as via digital marketing.
A total of 62 organisations took part in the survey.
