Better self-service options, trained agents on the cards in contact centres

Consumers around the globe engaging with contact centres can look forward to better self-service options and highly trained agents, who will resolve their complex enquiries faster. That's according to research results published in Dimension Data's 2011 Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report. Released today, the report reveals that the top focus for organisations worldwide is improving their customers' experience.

Taken together, of the 546 contact centres surveyed across 66 countries, 60% said they placed more importance on the customer experience than cost reduction. South African contact centre organisations, however, have a slightly different focus, with 64% stating their focus is on cost reduction and 48% on improving customer satisfaction.

Siva Pather, Dimension Data's National General Manager, Customer Interactive Solutions, Middle East & Africa, says South Africa's focus on cost reduction is not in contradiction to the general trend towards the overall drive towards service improvement in contact centres. “Organisations are investing more on recruiting and training agents compared to the results in the 2009 report - up 50% and 40% respectively on our 2009 results. In addition, spend on motivational and social events grew by 37% over the past two years. As a result, contact centre agents at the front line are being better equipped to deal with complex enquiries.”

Pather believes this signals a growing maturity in the global contact centre industry. “And South Africa's focus on reducing costs does not run counter to industry trends. When you consider that your people constitute 60% of the cost of operating a contact centre, then the better trained and motivated they are and the longer you retain them, the more easily you'll contain costs.”

Nearly 41% of organisations reported that they recognised the value of providing customer choice via multiple self-service channels, including social media.

The 2011 Report also reveals that, overall, 84% of organisations - up from 64% in 2009 - are measuring consumer satisfaction with the contact centre delivery, with agent ability to resolve queries being the single most important factor that either improves or diminishes the impact on customer satisfaction.

“Consumers are more comfortable than ever with interactive voice response (IVR) engagement and self-service options,” Pather says. “At the same time, we're seeing more organisations promoting the fact that consumers can speak to a 'live' agent. They're recognising the value of well-trained agents as a key service differentiator.”

Interestingly, although South African organisations share the belief of the others surveyed that agent ability to resolve queries is the most important way of improving satisfaction, they feel that keeping callers waiting has a bigger negative effect on customer satisfaction.

Pather says part of the answer to that problem is to boost self-service process effectiveness. “There's a lot of room to move, here, as 84% of businesses respond to their current offering as being behind, or at best, equal to the competition.

“In line with global trends, we expect to see more growth in the number of transaction volumes on the Internet. Web self-service is the most popular and widely provided self-serve channel, ahead of IVR and speech recognition systems, yet still falls 50% short of projected volumes. Contact centres have assumed a wider responsibility and the speed of evolution is presenting a challenge for organisations around measurement, with some contact centres reporting they were unsure of the proportion of consumers using each channel. However, there are still challenges around management of these and other emerging channels, where customer satisfaction is currently not yet being measured in a third of those participants polled.”

Meanwhile, the results showed increased focus on integrating systems to provide a more consistent customer experience. Over a quarter of Web and telephony systems are now integrated to provide more detailed customer profile information.

“We assess an organisation's ability to deliver a consistent customer experience across multiple channels by their ability to have a single view of a customer,” Pather says. “This year's results show a 40% increase in the number of businesses that are getting this right, which is good news for customers. Following a transition period, we anticipate significant improvements in consumer experience as the effect of better skills, better training and better information take hold.”