If your contact center has or is considering investing more resources into contact center training to successfully attract and keep staff you are not alone. A new report by Dimension Data reveals that more of your peers are doing just that.

Dimension Data’s 2011 Global Contact Center Benchmarking Report, which collected and analyzed data from 546 contact centers across 66 countries in 2010, says that agent recruiting and training is up 50 percent and 40 percent respectively from the 2009 results. In addition, spending on motivational and social events grew by 37 percent over the past two years.

Other results from the report include:

*          Social media interactions with Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter are high on the agenda of contact center businesses. More than 18 percent of survey participants reported they already manage these interactions, with 32 percent saying they plan to do so over the next two years

*          The convergence of voice, data and video is the number one trend on the agendas of most contact centers, which is predicted to drive a move towards simpler contact center environments through increased access to cloud-based services

*          Service availability and consolidation of technologies are ranked as the second and third top technology trends, respectively, with 70 percent of contact centers focused on demonstrating a return on investment for new upgrades or new technologies

*          Cloud-based services rated the sixth most important overall technology trend in this year’s report as organizations explore its advantages for the contact center and for the wider business

*          IP is being increasingly adopted in the contact center and is pivotal to enabling access to emerging cloud-based solutions. The year’s report found an almost 30 percent increase in the number of respondents already adopting IP in order to fulfill specific business requirements

*          Traditional contact centers are transitioning to “customer management centers” with 71 percent already handling Internet-based interactions, 14 percent managing SMS interactions and 36 percent offering web chat: all via the contact center

*          60 percent of organizations said they placed more importance on the customer experience than cost reduction, with 41 percent reporting they recognized the value of providing customer choice via multiple self-service channels

The RCCSP Professional Education Alliance is assisting contact centers and enterprises with staying on top and get ahead of these trends with contact center training and IT support training, education and insights across the breath of these areas. Expert industry-practitioner instructors from 40+ providers and leading-edge curricula communicate to contact center and IT support managers and supervisors with the knowledge they need that they can then beehive to their staff. The RCCSP Professional Education Alliance offers its contact center training through in-person seminars, often grouped together at key locations to save travel time and money, virtually i.e. the cloud and optionally on-site. Please visit or call 708-246-0320 for more information.