March 20, 2007By Tiisetso MotsoenengJohannesburg – Organisations spend $5 000 a month per agent’s seat to provide customer service through their call centres, a survey shows.
The Dimension Data’s Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report 2007 shows that the cash is used for staff, technology, other facilities and management costs.
According to the report, there are an estimated 6.5 million contact centre seats worldwide, translating to an investment of $33 billion (R243.2 billion).
The survey, which polled 403 contact centres located across 42 countries, underscores the need for management to ensure greater productivity and effectiveness from contact centre resources, according to Cara Diemont, editor of the report.
“The challenge for executives and contact centre management is to ensure that organisations get the best return on investment for both business and customers. Two key levers they can focus on to achieve this are call resolution and automation,” she said.
The report indicates a drop in the percentage of calls resolved by the first agent over the past three years: from 82.1 percent in the 2005 report to 80.7 percent in 2006 and 69.8 percent this year.
Also, contact centre agents spend around 60 percent of their time speaking to customers, responding to e-mails and handling queries.
Diemont said these two findings are of concerning because 40 percent of the investment made in agent seats is not directly linked to customer interaction and when it is, only seven out of ten calls are resolved by the first agent.
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“Unresolved calls frustrate customers and cost organisations money. If companies improve call resolution and agent utilisation, contact centre effectiveness can be substantially improved,” said Diemont.
The second lever is automation, which is widely regarded as a critical strategy for contact centres. The 2007 report highlights that automating processes or parts of processes is the top re-engineering and improvement priority for contact centres (54.9 percent).
“Many organisations focus on process automation and overlook the inescapable fact that automating a poorly defined or executed process will not improve the situation,” said Diemont.
Self-service is an automation strategy that is increasingly being adopted by organisations. Currently, 13.5 percent of contact centres use speech recognition while a quarter plan to implement it, the report noted.
“Success rates with voice-driven self-service have also improved, with completion rates on self-service continuing to climb – 19 percent compound growth on last year – across the board,” said Diemont. – I-Net Bridge
