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Summary
These days, contact centers are one of the most important interfaces between companies and their customers. Providing superior service can lead to more satisfied and loyal customers, and as a result more business. Conversely, failing to satisfy them can reduce the potential for generating more business and in the worst case cause customers to go elsewhere. Benchmark research by Ventana Research has found that companies are not making the most of their contact centers. The root causes, we conclude, are an overemphasis on managing costs and a tendency to focus on internal issues rather than the customer.

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In recent research by Ventana Research, sponsored by Genesys and IBM and media sponsors CCF/CallCentre.co.uk, Contact Professional, ICCM, Intelligent Enterprise, Montgomery Research and TMCnet, 30 percent of respondents to a survey reported that their customers are completely satisfied with the service they get from their contact centers; a further 61 percent said their customers are somewhat satisfied. We did find considerable variation in this perception across market segments, with Government rating the situation the worst and telecommunications companies giving themselves the highest marks. But even taking the most positive view, this still means 70 percent of companies admit to not achieving complete customer satisfaction all of the time.

In other industry research, customers have indicated that poor customer service had been a reason that they stopped doing business with a company. Further, customers are leaving relationships with businesses because of bad experiences like encountering agents with a poor command of English, long queue times, being left on hold, not having their issue resolved and being forced to use interactive voice response (IVR) through the telephone keypad.

The weight of these findings leads us to conclude that after years of trying and despite lots of rhetoric, companies are losing business simply because they don’t run their contact centers well. Ventana Research believes that results from our research as well as other surveys identify the underlying reason: The majority of companies are not really focused on the customer. Several related factors contribute to this situation. Businesses remain organized in separate departments, so that most processes are operated within individual business units and few span departmental boundaries. Customers thus are treated in isolation by each business unit, without consistency across unit boundaries. The same is true of channels of communication. Over the last few years companies have implemented new types of communication channels, mostly in an effort to reduce costs, but that piecemeal approach also produces systems that are run in isolation, and again customers don’t receive consistent responses across the different channels.

The situation is exacerbated by information systems architectures, which typically spread customer data across multiple systems. Our recent research found that 26 percent of respondents estimate that their companies store customer data in as many as 20 different types of systems, including customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), business-specific applications, data warehouses and even desktop spreadsheets. All these factors make it extremely hard, if not impossible, to create a complete “360 degree” view of a company’s business with customers that the entire organization uses consistently. When businesses lack such a single view, it is not surprising that customers don’t receive a consistent experience.

Even taking the above into account, Ventana Research still identifies the highest barrier to effective customer service in the contact center as companies’ continued drive to hold down costs. Our recent benchmark research into the use of technology in contact centers highlighted that the implementation of technologies such as voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), call routing and desktop management software is driven largely by expectations of cost savings, not by the additional customer services they can support. The same is true of new channels of communication: Most companies adopt the two most popular – Web-based self-service and interactive voice response – in hopes of cutting down the number of conversations between customers and agents and not for the additional services they offer. And finally, the measures they use to monitor the performance of agents remain focused on assessing the efficiency of interaction-handling rather than effectiveness in managing the customer experience.

Assessment
Ventana Research finds that companies say they are driven by improving customer satisfaction, but their behavior belies these claims. Our research and that of others show that customers are not happy with the way they treated. Studies have identified cost savings as the goal of most companies, whether it is evidenced by outsourcing to regions with low labor costs or just not hiring enough skilled agents to handle calls well. Advanced technologies are available to help companies address all the issues we have discussed, but most companies don’t use them to full advantage. Our research demonstrates that organizations that are really customer-centric are more successful in this area; to become so, others will have to change their fundamental view of the contact center, as well as their culture and processes.