Contact centres are taking the lead when it comes to driving technology change in the wider organisation, with an unusually high number of upgrades being planned for infrastructure platforms and continued growth in the use of transformation-enabling IP. In addition, IP is providing more opportunities to consolidate and simplify technology across the enterprise to address advances in communications technologies.
According to research results in the 2011 Contact Centre Benchmarketing Report, released today by global specialist IT services and solutions provider, Dimension Data, of the 546 contact centres surveyed in 62 countries across Asia, Australia, Europe, the US and Middle East & Africa, IP telephony is now deployed in nearly 50% of contact centres. This, together with just on 14% of participants planning to introduce it, suggests that the use of IP is now the default choice as advanced IP-based technologies continue to provide enhanced integration and operational flexibility.
Interestingly, South Africa's adoption of IP in the contact centre is higher - at 18.9%. Siva Pather, Dimension Data's National General Manager, Customer Interactive Solutions, Middle East & Africa, says this is because South Africa's contact centre is relatively young, with less of a legacy investment in analogue technology. “In fact, despite higher relative costs of bandwidth and lower availability of bandwidth, South African organisations have been able to move to new architectures more quickly. So, South Africa is ahead of global trends in terms of IP adoption.”
The convergence of voice, data and video is the top ranking technology trend on the agendas of most contact centres and should drive a move towards simpler contact centre environments through increased access to cloud-based services. Service availability and consolidation of technologies are ranked second and third respectively. The 2011 Report also reveals that 70% of contact centres are focused on demonstrating the return on investment for any new upgrades or new technologies.
In South Africa, however, although organisations gave a high ranking to the convergence of voice, data, and video, more than 50% mentioned technology consolidation as a more important trend than any of the others. Pather believes this is because more South African organisations already have the ability to consolidate technology, using their IP platform.
“IP in the contact centre is pivotal to enabling access to emerging cloud-based solutions and gives cloud providers the ability to provision contact centre infrastructures that are reliable, flexible and cost-effective.
“So, contact centres across all countries now realise the business and functional benefits of introducing IP into the contact centre. Our research tells us that cost savings and flexible architecture are the top two reasons (70%) for adopting IP in the contact centre. In addition, compared to our 2009 Report research, there's an almost 30% increase in the number of respondents already adopting IP in order to fulfil specific business requirements.”
Cloud-based services are the fastest growing technology trend in all contact centres - rated the sixth most important overall trend. The announcement by Apple earlier this month of its breakthrough set of free new cloud services that work seamlessly with applications on smart devices or PCs to automatically and wirelessly store content, will undoubtedly help establish cloud even further, and increase the demand to new levels.
Pather believes that in South Africa, migration to cloud will be via private cloud solutions, given the complexity of application integration that exists in large South African corporates.
“In general, however, organisations today have more options available to make the business case for change. Rather than high capex spend, they're looking to software as a service and hosted cloud. This means they're able to upgrade existing technologies and enable revenue.
“With 77% of those respondents surveyed reporting that contact centre architecture is being managed as part of their wider enterprise strategy, this demonstrates the clearest evidence yet of the interest at enterprise level in the role that contact centres will play to drive company-wide benefits and revenue.
Historically, contact centres have taken a conservative approach. “Now, they have easy, pay-as-you-use access to a range of new technology options via multi-sourcing technologies such as hosted cloud and SaaS,” Pather says. “And, because technology is more affordable, organisations that choose to ignore these opportunities face the risk of unsustainable costs, deteriorating service, and ultimately losing customers to the competition.”
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