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			Business Research: Contact Center, Customer Performance Vendor Research: Aspect, CallTower, Cisco Systems, Consona, Five9, Genesys Telecommunications Lab, IBM, InQuira, Jacada, Microsoft, NICE Systems, Nortel, Oracle, RightNow, Salesforce.com, Saratoga Systems, Syntellect, Varolii, Witness Systems, VPI, ClickFox, Tealeaf
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Summary
A new study from Ventana Research, “Customer Interaction Technologies,” has found that information technology plays an important role in running a contact center and that by using it to its full potential, companies can improve their overall performance. While cost is an important consideration in a company’s decision to purchase new technology, it is not always the most important aspect. We advise executives to take a more active role in how the technology in their contact centers can help manage customer relationships and can promote efficiency and effectiveness in the enterprise.

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Our model assesses contact center maturity in four dimensions – people, process, information and technology – and defines maturity in four successive levels: Tactical, Advanced, Strategic and Innovative. At the Tactical level, the center does little more than centralize call handling in an effort to minimize cost. At the Advanced level, companies add additional channels of communication – e-mail, fax, postal mail and the Web. Although still cost-conscious, Advanced companies have begun to shift their focus toward increasing customer satisfaction. Strategic companies explore deployment of more advanced communication channels such as instant and mobile text messaging, and they begin to use the center as a strategic asset to help win additional business. To do this they begin to pay more attention to the managing agents and the tools they provide to help them. At the Innovative level, companies recognize that the contact center has become the primary contact point with the vast majority of their customers and begin to use their centers to differentiate themselves from the competition: They deploy channels of communication such as video, and they link the center’s processes more closely to enterprise-wide processes. They also begin to use the information collected in the center to identify the root cause of why customers are interacting with them so they can make improvements to reduce interaction volumes in the future.

In this study, sponsored by Genesys and IBM and media sponsors CCF/CallCentre.co.uk, Contact Professional, Questex Media – ICCM, Intelligent Enterprise, Montgomery Research and TMCnet, our maturity analysis for the use of technology found 41 percent of centers at the Tactical level, 28 percent at Advanced, 17 percent at Strategic, and 14 percent at Innovative. We also found that companies in highly competitive markets with very large customer bases  – for example, centers in telecommunications and retail finance – tend to be the most mature. But generally speaking, the results show that it is down to individual company choice as to how mature they make their centers.

We found that maturity levels tend to be lower for the people and information aspects of contact centers than for process and technology. The people analysis largely concerns who sets the customer relationship management strategy and how agent performance is managed. At the Tactical level, the results show, many companies leave the strategy to marketing and to a lesser extent to sales and the contact center, while more mature companies involve the executive committee. The most mature have appointed a senior executive whose sole responsibility is managing customers. From an agent performance perspective, it is only at the Innovative level that companies pay significantly more attention to agents and have shifted to more business-related metrics rather than relying on contact throughput numbers.

Our analysis of process maturity shows that contact centers are quite good at defining and executing their internal processes for operations such as handling different call types, handing calls from one agent to another or escalating a call to someone more senior when the need arises. What they are not so good at is putting these processes into the context of the overall business – how a sales inquiry fits with the caller’s overall profile of doing business with the company, for example. More mature companies have tools such as process mapping, workflow, instant messaging and collaboration to align different processes and improve collaboration between lines of business.

The results clearly show the importance of technology to contact center operations. Even a Tactical center relies heavily on technology – for example, using an automatic call distribution (ACD) system to route incoming calls to the next available agent. But as centers mature, they require more servers to manage e-mail, faxes, the Web interface, call routing, self-service, a smarter agent desktop, agent workforce management, workflow, business intelligence (BI) and so on. At their heart, centers rely heavily on voice and data networks to link agents and to other business groups, distributed centers, external partners and, increasingly, remote workers. The research showed a majority of companies (59 percent) say they have deployed voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) as part of their corporate networking technology; 36 percent have deployed a VoIP-based contact center. Both these figures have increased from similar research we carried out at the end of 2005. We believe this trend will continue so that VoIP becomes the dominant technology in the next five years.

The research shows that the least mature aspect of running a center is the information used to monitor and assess performance. The measures used remain focused on efficiency, with little evidence that companies have begun to transition to more business-oriented measures. What is more, the majority of centers rely on manual processes supported by Excel spreadsheets, with only the most mature using a specialized business intelligence tool to derive this information.

Assessment
Since their inception, contact centers have relied heavily on technology to run as efficiently as possible. Today companies face an even bigger challenge as more and more interactions are handled outside the traditional contact center, thereby increasing the reliance of technology to make the operation run as effectively as possible. The results of this research show that companies continue to invest in more advanced technologies such as VoIP, call routing, workforce management, agent desktop management software, and contact-center specific BI. What’s more, they plan to use the technology in smarter ways rather than just to save money. Ventana Research believes most companies could do much more with the technologies they use today and that companies should look at how they use the technology they have already deployed, as well as investigating additional technologies that are available to make their operations more efficient and more effective and thus their contact centers more mature.