Call Center On Demand Featured Article

The Business Value of a Call Center on Demand

By David Sims
TMCnet Contributing Editor

A recent white paper from Five9 (News - Alert) titled “The Business Value of A Cloud-Based Contact Center” deals with the results of a survey conducted by Aberdeen Group, of 129 contact center pros to distinguish the best in class companies from “Industry Average” to “Laggards.”

It found, probably not surprisingly, that “increased customer demand” is what drove contact center initiatives, and that best in class companies are trying out new service delivery models to improve their contact center resource availability and performance.

Specifically, the study found, best in class companies generally used a flexible infrastructure supporting their changing business needs, which enabled them to reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction and find higher call center uptime.

What qualifies as best in class, as opposed to a laggard? According to Aberdeen’s (News - Alert) criteria, best in class companies resolve 75 percent of calls at the first touch, are able to decrease customer complaints by 17 percent over 12 months and average $10.60 cost per call over the past 12 months.

And how do they do that? Again, Aberdeen’s research found that there were some striking commonalities of best in class companies -- 95 percent of them have individuals or teams working on contact center performance analysis, 79 percent practice regular and consistent performance monitoring, 74 percent measure customer satisfaction against corporate goals -- note that this implies they have both corporate goals and the metrics to measure how close they’re getting -- and 64 percent make such customer information as contact and transaction history available for the agent on demand during the call.

Boiling all the research down, what Aberdeen found was this:

Best in class performance is achieved when companies make detailed customer transaction information available for the agent before the call begins, enable hosted Interactive Voice Response (IVR), build business intelligence into their contact center technology strategy -- again, note that you need, in fact, a contact center technology strategy in the first place -- and use a unified communications platform.

The entire paper is well worth a read for delving into the details of all that.

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