Short Message Service (SMS) Looking Ahead to 2010

By Keith Dawson (News - Alert)
Principal Analyst, Frost & Sullivan

It is with some amazement that I recall that in the early 1990s, when I was a fledgling observer of the call center industry. I wrote an article predicting what the landscape would look like in the then-far-off world of 2010. That article and its prognostications are fortunately lost to the mists of pre-Internet time. But now, with just moments to go before we reach that future, I offer some better educated guesses about what the next year holds for contact centers, their technologies and their operations.

The last two years have been tough for the industry due to the economy and the pressure that’s been put on operations managers to cut costs. But in the process, we have seen centers take on a much more vocal stance trying to educate their senior execs about the essential role those centers play in building customer loyalty and, hence, revenue.

For the first time, we see contact centers backing up the contention through the use of new metrics built from close analysis of the relationship between operations and customer value. Centers are using new types of analytics systems to create those metrics and justify their operations up the ladder. This will continue, become more refined, and when we look back at 2010, may well be the main story of the year. I think we’ll look at 2010 and 2011 as the pivotal period when lines between enterprises and centers become utterly blurry.

That cost-cutting imperative has also forced many companies to come to terms with their wildly variable approaches to self-service. The paradigm of using IVR as a secondary call-catcher to deflect from expensive, agented service is still the default. But customers are so much more diverse and mercurial, and therefore likely to approach from so many different vectors. This being the case, it’s crazy not to try something new. Frost & Sullivan research found last year that few centers were willing to invest in taking on new customer access channels in 2009. I think that will start to change in 2010 – but the channels that will be explored will be tentative, careful and more tightly integrated with the existing structures than in the past.

And that means that 2010 will be a good year for knowledge management and other integration technologies. KM takes information that’s housed in separate silos and makes it centrally available to agents at the point of interaction. It has uses in training, customer management and product support and development. It’s been underused in centers, and I think it sits there like low-hanging fruit, waiting to be exploited for the benefit of a lot centers.

Because of an incredible array of empowering tools, today’s customers arrive at the interaction with a lot more raw data about their situation than they ever had before. Much of it may be wrong, misguided, opaque and different from what the agent knows. How are you going to make sure that an agent doesn’t just sit there responding like a trained parrot when a customer confronts him with something that “the Internet says is true” but the agent’s script doesn’t comprehend? Knowledge management, that’s how. By leveraging the incredible wealth of information from inside and outside the company, organizing it, and empowering the agent to use it to the company’s advantage, that too will be the big story of 2010.

One of issues I’ve been tracking is the increased use of managed customer forums for support and intelligence. Customers often like to help each other, and they like to talk about their experiences as customers. Many companies have been slow to leverage that customer environment for their own benefit. But the benefit is real – having a place where knowledgeable customers gather and share information is a real boon to support organizations. It amplifies your own product support team’s research efforts into solving problems. And it makes external solutions able to be vetted and repeated. It also provides a place for companies to hear – and deal with – negative feedback in a manner that’s relatively unthreatening. We’re seeing a lot of activity among the vendor community of CRM and support software tools to add forum management capabilities to their tools. Much of this movement is driven by contact center demand.

Conversations I’ve had with practitioners over the last few months lead me to believe we’re also going to see a sharp rise in the use of proactive outbound messaging to customers. This has several values – first, it can lead to call deflection, by heading off problem-related inbound calls. It can foster loyalty, especially if the outbound allows customers to see some immediate benefit from the contact. And, perhaps, it can show revenue impact if the proper opportunity for cross-selling presents itself. Many people are looking at this as an option. Happily, people are moving slowly at this, tempered somewhat by the very real fear of alienating customers. But the movement is real. We’ll see a sharp upsurge this year in proactive outbound, especially done by SMS text messaging.

Lastly, I predict that inside contact centers everyone will continue to describe the place where they work as a “call center,” despite every pundit’s best efforts at change. It’s still mainly a voice world, friends.

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