Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
New Zealand Contact Centers See Better-Than-Expected Growth
In a climate of depressing reports of growth, revenue and sales, here is some cautious good news for the New Zealand contact center industry: according to a new study, callcentres.net 2010 New Zealand Contact Centre Industry Benchmarking Report, the country's contact center industry recorded four percent growth in 2010, translating to a rise in contact center seats from 28,730 to 29,000.
The increase is good news in that it is higher than the one percent growth rate that had been predicted 12 months ago; however, the report cautions against overenthusiastic optimism. The industry has seen a five percent decline in operating budgets over the past year, and will probably see a likely one percent further decline in seats in the 12 months ahead.
The study was sponsored by RightNow (www.rightnow.com), a provider of on demand customer experience solutions. The report's conclusions are based on interviews with contact center executives representing over 60 individual contact centers, 12 percent of which were outsourced contact center services providers. The interviews were conducted last month by callcentres.net, a specialist research, consulting and news organization.
There is some other “silver lining in the cloud” conclusions in the report: due to economic recession conditions, full-time agent turnover has decreased to 28 percent in 2010, compared with 31 percent in 2009 and 35 percent in 2008. Part-time agent turnover also dropped, reaching 36 percent in 2010 compared with 40 percent in 2009. Decreased agent turnover translates directly to savings for contact centers via a reduction in recruiting, hiring and training expenses.
Contact center solutions and systems expenditures also rose very moderately, with spending increasing six percent during the year, rebounding from a 19 percent decline in 2009. The report cautioned, however, that there is still a long way to go before technology spending returns to 2008 levels.
Dr. Catriona Wallace, Managing Director, callcentres.net said, “While the industry is showing some positive signs, the decline in operating budgets and next year's anticipated drop in seats indicate that contact centers need to proceed with caution. The research results suggest that the NZ contact center sector was not as strongly affected as the Australian industry by the economic downturn, however, the recovery may take a more time in NZ.”
Challenges for the future for New Zealand contact centers include upgrading existing technologies which may no longer be meeting business needs, inadequate headcount to effectively meet business requirements and improving customer satisfaction, which slipped by one percentage point from 2009 to 2010 (81 percent and 80 percent, respectively). Many companies will find they need to use their trimmed down contact center budgets judiciously to maximize efficiency and ensure that continued slippage of customer satisfaction scores does not continue.
Many contact centers running on worn-out and outdated platforms and software suites have found cost savings, efficiencies and improved operations from implementing newer and more flexible cloud-based customer experience solutions that are designed to maximize customer service while accommodating changing call volumes and head counts.
Tracey Schelmetic is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Tracey's articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Chris DiMarco