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Businesses still treat all customers the same, says latest FrontRange Solutions Call Centre Expo SurveyCombining business applications and telephony enables service differentiation - business value of convergence better understood NEC, Birmingham, Wednesday 4 October 2006: Businesses both large and small increasingly understand the benefits of converged voice and data applications in improving customer service. Yet, despite the ability of such solutions to support effective service differentiation, businesses continue to take a ‘one size fits all’ approach to service delivery. So finds the second annual FrontRange Solutions User Survey, undertaken at Call Centre Expo 2006 currently taking place at the NEC, Birmingham, and designed to ‘take the pulse’ of companies attending the Show. Of those surveyed, 25% want cost reduction, 18% best practice process improvement and 14% reduced complexity (e.g. by reducing the number of suppliers) from their communications solution. Yet fully 23% are now looking beyond this to increased customer satisfaction and retention, achievable only through a converged solution combining business intelligence with telephony. Supporting this, 22% of respondents already recognise converged voice and data applications as most important within their call centre. “It is disappointing to note that an overwhelming 81% fail to seize the opportunity converged technologies offer to prioritise and give their best customers – however defined - the best service and so improve the chances of keeping them,” says Alastair Trower, product marketing manager, EMEA, FrontRange Solutions. “At the same time, though many SMEs have yet to recognise that the enterprise benefits of convergence are equally available to them, it is encouraging to see that more businesses understand how communications solutions can deliver better customer service as well as internal cost savings.” ‘New for old’ with IT telephony The latest report endorses the findings of the 2005 survey, that VoIP is firmly on most companies’ IT investment ‘radar’. Of those surveyed, 81% have either already implemented, or plan to implement an IP telephony solution over the next 12 months, compared to 67% last year. When asked which benefits were of greatest value to them as individual managers in implementing a VoIP solution, responses still focus strongly on internal issues such as reduced call costs (45%), call centre churn (20%) and reduced admin costs (12%). However, as in 2005, external factors such as increased customer retention (27%) and increased customer satisfaction (20%) figured highly when respondents were asked which benefits were most important to the broader business. “In many cases, an IP-based telephony implementation on its own will be little more than ‘new for old’ replacement of outdated technology,” Trower believes. “Essentially designed to keep the business going, any cost improvements – however valuable - are exclusively internal. For those end-users who also anticipate external customer-facing gains to accrue to the broader business therefore, VoIP will continue to fall short of expectations. “By contrast, in bringing together IP telephony with other business applications such as service management, CRM or help desk systems, solutions such as FrontRange’s business application suite - based on a common Microsoft .NET platform - will deliver real business value, enabling substantial operational savings while improving customer responsiveness, through the use of ‘intelligent’ call routing based on what the business already knows about the customer. Other findings included: • 96% of respondents expect to invest the same, or more, on communications (e.g. IP telephony, web site, call centre or converged technology) in the coming year. • Of those companies providing a banded service, 39% differentiate their service based on current spend, followed by 28% on type of product/service purchased and 21% on size of customer. Only 6% currently prioritise on the basis of potential spend. • When investing in a communications solution, 49% believe return on investment to be the most important factor in their decision-making, ahead of cost of deployment (16%), customer satisfaction (15%) and speed of deployment (11%). • For 25% of respondents, automated call distribution (ACD) is the most important requirement for their call centre, closely followed by voice self-service (23%), converged applications (22%) and interactive voice recognition(IVR)/skills-based routing (15%). “This squares well with the stated desire to improve customer service,” points out Trower. “Our own experience shows an increasing recognition among client companies that customers will respond positively to such technologies – so long as they are properly implemented with ease-of-use for the customer front of mind.” FrontRange Solutions is exhibiting its complete range of integrated contact centre and customer management solutions at Call Centre Expo 2006, Europe’s leading customer contact solutions event. This year, the Show will attract more than 200 exhibitors and aims to support the education and purchasing of the latest customer relationship technologies and solutions. “Following on from last year’s results, our survey findings reflect a growing awareness of how converged solutions, integrating voice and data, can provide increased customer satisfaction and loyalty as well as internal efficiency gains,” says Trower. “Yet if companies want to realise fully the business value of long-term relationships with their best customers, they must utilise the business intelligence within such solutions to deliver a properly differentiated service.” |