"Our Take" - Contact Center Maturity

(Past Editions by: Date, Title, Topic)

 
About "Our Take" 
"Our Take" is a collection of daily vignettes covering a wide range of CRM topics. It's an attempt to add our own spin to the world of CRM. We will use the column to share our perspectives, opinions, epiphanies, web nuggets, or quite frankly anything that moves us. Get ready to expect the unexpected. And, don't be shy about sharing your thoughts.
 
 
3/29/06 - Contact Center Maturity - Part 1
Over the next few days, I'm going to take the opportunity to use this column to share the results of a research study done by Ventana Research. CRMAdvocate helped in the research by encouraging our readers (that's you) to contribute. The study is called "Evaluating Maturing in Contact Centers: A Performance Management Research Study" (executive summary).
 
I encourage you to read the executive summary but allow me to summarize a few points that struck me as important. First point: contact center maturity increases with the size of the company. However, this is a trend, not cause and effect. One might assume that maturity rises because of the ability to invest.
 
Ventana's research indicates that maturity is more driven by competitive forces than size of company. In other words, if your competitors are using the contact center as a strategic weapon, you are more likely to invest in your own contact center. Alternatively, if competitive threats aren't as big an issue (public sector, for example), maturity is not as high. Read more tomorrow.
 
Gary Lemke, Publisher
(Share your thoughts)
 
3/30/06 - Contact Center Maturity - Part 2
Today we continue to summarize some of the key findings in the research study is called "Evaluating Maturing in Contact Centers: A Performance Management Research Study" (executive summary).
 
The second interesting point I took from the research note is a statement about business analytics. The report finds that few centers have business analytics that enable them to monitor customer satisfaction in a meaningful way. The authors contend that most contact centers are missing out on the possibility of improving customer satisfaction. The findings suggest few contact centers perform root-cause analysis on why customers are calling; if done correctly, this could dramatically reduce the need for many calls and thereby reduce costs.
 
The study identified two major areas in which current technologies hold back centers. First, few centers have the ability to extract data from multiple data sources limiting the ability to produce business-related analytics that span the contact center and the other lines of business. Second, the study found that agents have to access two or more applications to resolve customer interactions and often have to key the same data into both. Does this sound like your contact center?
 
Gary Lemke, Publisher
(Share your thoughts)
 
3/31/06 - Contact Center Maturity - Part 3
We continue to summarize the key findings in the research study is called "Evaluating Maturing in Contact Centers: A Performance Management Research Study" (executive summary). One interesting finding from the study is a reversal of trends - a large number of companies plan to involve different groups within the company in handling customer interactions, a trend that leads toward the so-called virtual contact center.
 
The original mission of many contact centers was to centralize call handling, making it more efficient and giving customers a single point of contact. Now is seems nearly half of the surveyed contact centers plan to involve remote workers, mobile workers, knowledge workers or a combination of them. So why the reversal of the original mission?
 
While the technology is available today to make virtualization a reality, I find it interesting that many organizations that are looking at outsourcing as a way to save money (read cheaper labor) are open to making more expensive people available to answer customer calls. Do you find the trend as perplexing as me?
 
Gary Lemke, Publisher
(Share your thoughts)