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			Business Research: Contact Center Technology Research: Business Process Management, Operational Intelligence Imperative Research: Business Innovation, Compliance Management, Cost Management, Performance Improvement, Process Improvement, Profitability Management
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Summary
The Contact Center Performance Management practice at Ventana Research is dedicated to helping organizations improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their multichannel contact centers. Research we did in 2006 revealed a trend to virtualize contact-handling and involve other parts of the business outside the contact center. We found that most companies see this as a technology issue, but Ventana Research believes that it is more about people and process. Therefore, during 2007 we will assess how companies are changing the ways they handle customer interactions, the technologies they are deploying to support these new processes and tools they use to deliver metrics focused on business and customers.

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In many respects, little changed during 2006 in the way companies run their contact centers. For 2007, we believe the highest priorities remain efficiency and cost control. Most customer interactions still come in the form of telephone calls to agents, which has led companies to seek ways to make their agents more efficient. They have done this mostly by trying to improve their training programs. Many companies have experimented with getting customers to utilize more self-service by directing them to their Web sites. But the levels of success in doing this remain low, and many visits still result in a call to the contact center.

This customer preference continues to make technology of major importance to contact center operational management. Many managers look to it to reduce the costs of calls; thus we have seen an increase in adoption of voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). They also see VoIP as a foundation for the virtualization of contact-handling – that is, distributing calls to people outside the contact center in an effort to ensure that the person best able to resolve the customer’s issue receives the call. As companies do this, we expect them to change the way that they measure contact-handling performance, moving from efficiency measures such as average call length to measures of effectiveness, such as how many calls it takes to make a sale or the cost of supporting a particular customer segment.

One new technology seems particularly promising. In the past, contact centers have recorded a percentage of their calls for the purpose of monitoring agents’ performance. Now technologies have improved to the extent that companies can record all calls. Furthermore, new techniques have emerged that enable companies to analyze the content of these recorded calls automatically. We believe that as well as improving the monitoring of agents’ performance, companies will be able to use the recordings to assess much better how their customers are reacting to agents. This is turn should enable them to develop more customer-focused performance measures.

To guide strategic planning to improve contact center performance, Ventana Research will undertake the following research programs this year:

Improving Contact Center Performance
We will examine how companies are trying to balance the costs of running their contact centers and the need to improve customer satisfaction. We will assess the deployment of more “intelligent” desktops for the agents, which allow them to log on once, navigate through applications in ways more consistent with call-handling processes and shift between applications more easily; if implemented successfully, these improvements should make the agents both more efficient and more effective. We also will study how to use more sophisticated workforce management applications to utilize agents more efficiently and to ensure calls are handled by the most appropriately skilled person. And we will investigate business intelligence (BI) and analytics tools to assess and monitor performance of the center overall and of individual agents.

We found in a 2006 research survey that contact centers are not much concerned about complying with new privacy, data protection and data use regulations. Ventana Research thinks they should pay more attention to them. In many instances, the center now is the front-line business unit responsible for dealing with customers, so we will assess how methodologies such as Six Sigma can be applied not only to improve performance but also to satisfy new process and reporting requirements.

Integrating the Contact Center with the Enterprise
Our research indicates that companies intend to distribute the handling of customer calls to people outside the contact center. We will explore how to improve communication and collaboration between agents in the call center and employees in the rest of the business. We also will assess how the processes for handling interactions in the contact center can be brought more in line with enterprise business processes.

Another key aspect of improving the management of customer interactions is to improve channels of customer self-service by integrating the customer portal and the contact center. We will assess how companies can deploy self-service without damaging customer satisfaction. And of course, the performance of agents remains key to maintaining and improving customer satisfaction. We will assess how companies can optimize agent training through better analytics and improve their incentive programs as a tool to increase revenue.

Innovation in the Contact Center
Many companies say they intend to change their contact center from a cost center to a profit center. We will examine to what extent this is actually happening, including how companies can use new business intelligence and analytics software to identify and monitor the metrics needed to do so. We will look as well at how this kind of analysis can help them make better operational decisions. And will assess how companies can use new technologies such as location intelligence to improve the response to customer service requests.

Our 2006 research also determined that many companies wish to virtualize their contact center. We will assess both the process and technology issues required to do this, including researching how companies can use intelligent call-routing software to ensure that customer calls go to the person best able to resolve an issue.

Assessment
For many companies, the contact center has become their primary point of contact with customers. Yet the way call centers are managed has changed very little in the last 10 years: The focus remains on efficiency and keeping costs down. Ventana Research believes that in the next two to three years organizations will have to change to focus more on effectiveness. To do that, many companies will have to revise their processes and adopt different metrics to monitor and assess performance. As more vendors come to market with innovative products for contact centers during 2007, Ventana Research will work closely with operational management and vendors to bridge the knowledge gap and to enable the rapid adoption of these new technologies. Our research will support a new model of operations based on improved processes that both improve customer satisfaction and generate additional business for companies at lower costs.