A recentstudy by Volt Delta, titled “Outsourcing for Outsourcers Contact Center OnDemand and Voice Self-Service for a Competitive Edge” looks at issues challenging contact center outsourcers.

Some highlights from their findings:

Delaying investment. The recent state of the economy is partly to blame. The recession has caused many outsourcers to delay capital investment. Many call distribution and agent infrastructures installed in the past 20 years have become obsolete or do not have capabilities outsourcers require to remain competitive. In many cases, upgrades have been skipped in the interest of short-term cost savings. As a result, they are prevented from taking advantage of newer technology to achieve multi-channel support and/or cost savings attained from a ubiquitous IP Infrastructure.

Growth in mobility. A notable example is the “mobilization” of the world with cell phones and other wireless devices, presenting tremendous implications for contact center outsourcers. Mobile callers expect anytime and anywhere support with multi-channel options such as SMS messaging. Outsourcers ignoring the special concerns and opportunities to better serve mobile callers will find themselves at a distinct disadvantage.

Increase range of service. Services demanded of contact center outsourcers extend beyond the contact channel to the agent. Multi-lingual support and the ability to locate agents in increasingly diverse geographies are frequently demanded, with customer satisfaction and loyalty metrics as primary drivers.

Distributed micro contact centers. This issue of agent location is a moving target for contact center outsourcers. Previous offshoring efforts for some companies have fallen out of favor due to negative customer service feedback. Home agents have been a hot topic, but satisfaction can be impacted as managers at times might not know who is really answering the phone at home.     The mini or micro contact center appears to be gaining favor with distributed groups of 2 to 50 agents providing customer care.

Measuring caller satisfaction. Perhaps the lowest common denominator for contact center outsourcers is providing and proving customer satisfaction (along with cost savings) for their customers. Statistics tracking first call resolutions, call re- opens, and queue status are increasingly being fortified by surveys and other evaluation techniques to feed Net Promoter