Contact centres are increasing using technology such as interactive voice response (IVR) and SMS, according to the Merchants Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report 2006.
Out of 363 contact centres from 38 countries, nearly a third (31%) use IVR technology and a further 17% plan to install it the next year. If contact centres implement these plans, almost half will be using speech recognition within a year, according to report statistics.
In SA, 12% of contact centres have indicated that speech recognition technology will be deployed in the next 12 months, says Siva Pather, business solution architect, Customer Interactive Solutions, Dimension Data, SA.
Only 42% use caller-entered digits in their IVR functionality. This means centres are asking customers to enter data and are not capable of passing the data through to agents, the report reveals.
Menu selection, or call steering, continues to be the most commonly deployed speech application, with 29% of centres using this and a further 11% planning to install it.
IVR is popular in single language countries but the acoustic model needs to be worked on for the South African market, since we need to accommodate for linguistics and slang, as well as official language, says Pather.
Despite these factors, IVR use has grown from 6% last year to 31% in 2006, says Pather.
There continues to be little use of dialling technology for outbound calls. Most outbound customer contact is still triggered manually (90% for ad hoc service call backs and 66% for outbound campaigns). This is in spite of the fact that about a third of centres have screen or preview dialling (34%), predictive dialling (33%) or speed dialling (31%) technology in place, the report says.
Integration
When reviewing the integration of channels, IVR has the highest level of integration - 58% of centres have fully integrated the IVR channel and a further 32% have partially integrated the IVR channel. Three-quarters (74%) of centres indicate that e-mail is a utilised channel, yet less than half have it fully integrated.
A quarter of the sample group uses text messaging or SMS, while 10% plan to upgrade to this infrastructure and a further 12% plan to install the feature within the next year.
Of the 41% of organisations that indicate SMS is a channel used in their contact centres, 72% have fully or partially integrated it.
IP migration
Migration to IP continues and almost half of contact centres indicated that they have hybrid or pure IP PBX and automatic call distribution (ACD) switches. All the centres are planning to install an ACD (10%) indicated that it would be a pure IP solution, the report says.
SA is ahead in the IP game, with 50% of contact centres indicating they already have IP-based or hybrid telephony environments. SA plans to have 2.9 million IP points installed by 2009, says Pather.
SLAs, renting, hosting
The report shows technology support service level agreements (SLAs) are in place for most centres and almost a quarter have proactive support. Eighty-eight percent of centres have or are in the process of putting SLAs in place to support their technology environment. Almost half (44%) now have at least reactive, also called break/fix, support for their environment. Almost a quarter have a level of proactive support in place, whereby there is some degree of automated fault detection and alerting.
The report identifies a significant increase in the renting and hosting of contact centre infrastructure.
A quarter of centres have chosen to rent technology (compared to 4% last year), 15% have chosen to buy hosted technology (5% last year) and 31% purchase hosted technology from their telecommunications provider (compared to 3% last year).
Over two-thirds (68%) of centres globally have some means of identifying their customer during an interaction using a customer database. Additionally, a large proportion (46%) use some sort of customer relationship management application. These statistics are still disappointing, Pather says.
Less than 30% of companies have a technology disaster recovery plan that has been tested while 15% of companies have no plan at all.
Just fewer than 50% of respondents have both a defined technology strategy and architecture in place for their contact centre.
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