In September and October this year, Intelecom asked for feedback on six critical areas designed to find out what really matters in the contact centre, from people, customers and technology to the key trends to watch out for in the foreseeable future.
Borge Astrup, managing director of Intelcom Contact Centre Division commented, “Surveying leaders at the very heart of the contact centre revealed positive evidence to support our own experience of the industry as well as some interesting new findings. The results show that the contact centre is very much alive and kicking with customer service as a priority. There is plenty of scope for technological advances and business growth as the contact centre transitions to a truly multichannel environment and transforms itself into a highly interactive customer engagement forum.
Highlights of Intelecoms survey, published today, reveal that:
- Voice is still the predominant channel in contact centres (88%) followed by email (82%), mail (65%) and even fax (47%). The rise in social media is supported by 41% of respondents who claim Facebook is the most popular communication medium followed closely by Twitter at 40%
- The three most important metrics for todays contact centre are customer satisfaction (61.5%), service level (57%) and first contact resolution (40%) with call abandonment (22%) and Average Handling Time (20%) still actively used to measure the performance
- Traditional premised-based contact centres are still the most prevalent at 47% with cloud-based contact centres accounting for just over 10%. However, the trend points towards a blend of both traditional and cloud (34%) infrastructures as a more realistic option.
- The majority (69%) of applications used by agents are in-house developed systems followed by Oracle (20%) Salesforce (19%) and Microsoft Dynamics (15%) thereby supporting the need for integration capabilities in the contact centre.
- Most contact centre professionals still rely on their own customer satisfaction surveys (82%) followed by email surveys (37%) and post-call IVR surveys (23%) to acquire the voice of the customer or find out what they really think. Surprisingly, nearly 10% of respondents claim to never ask for customer feedback with a further 10% using speech analytics to gauge reactions from customers.
- Top priorities for contact centre leaders in the next two years are improved customer satisfaction (68%), agent training and satisfaction (62%) and technology transformation (58%).
- Nearly one third of respondents (31%) are looking to reduce their costs to serve customers despite revenue per call, cost per call and sales volume being cited as the least important metrics (5%, 7.5% and 13% respectively) in their contact centre today.