3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

A Consero Group study has shown the contact center  in general is badly underfunded, and increasingly called upon to fill new roles, a practice that is set to continue into 2016.

The contact center heads studied all know the key priority: improving customer experiences. Almost one in four identified that as a primary goal. Despite this, just one in three believed that the necessary resources to improve that experience were on hand. Technology and infrastructure represented the greatest hurdle to improvement, with almost half—48 percent—saying as much. Seventy-eight percent noted that the current level of technology at that business in general isn't sufficient to improve the customer experience.

Technology concerns were clearly out in front, as the second-highest concern was economic at 22 percent, followed by senior management buy-in at 19 percent. Despite this, contact centers are doing a lot more with less, as 43 percent of respondents noted that the total number of contact centers under said respondents' watch was on the rise. Forty-five percent noted that the number remained the same, but only one in four called outsourcing a “strategic priority.”

Worse, current levels of training satisfy just 39 percent of respondents, and only 35 percent consider reps sufficiently engaged in the customer experience. Only one in four respondents were happy with the current workforce management tools, and 68 percent were unhappy with current data and analytics tools. Customer demands are on the rise, as 59 percent cite phone and email—37 percent phone, 22 percent email—as the main channels to reach the contact center. These channels are often proving too limited to provide the smooth, seamless, and hassle-free first-call resolution that customers want.

In the end, it comes down to one of the oldest questions in the corporate world: if customer service is so important, why is it paid the least? We cannot continue to expect contact centers to do anything with nothing. Budgets are tight all over these days, yes, and that makes the raw cash hard to find to execute improvements. Companies must ask, however, how much tighter the budget will be if current customers get fed up with the customer experience being presented and instead go to a competing firm.

Developments like outsourcing—which no longer necessarily means “offshoring”—can be a big help here, as it reduces contact center operations down to a monthly expense as opposed to ongoing capital expenditures to improve operations. Regardless of the method chosen, improving the customer experience is vital to continued operations and needs to be treated as such before no one has a budget to work with any more.