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Published on: November 2006
Type of content: ANALYST REPORT
Format: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) (683 kb)
Length: 22 pages
Price: FREE

Overview:
"The Contact Center as a Profit Center"

Aberdeen Group Benchmark Report

Underwritten by Astute Solutions



From 2000 to 2004, the web received a great deal of attention and investment as the self service contact channel of choice. The traditional call center was considered outdated, expensive, and difficult to manage. However, after multiple studies concluded that customers prefer the phone, renewed attention was given to the call center, particularly the self service call center.



Advancement in speech recognition technologies and scalability have brought new life into the voice channel and companies large and small across every industry are rediscovering the call center as a profit center and a valuable customer contact point.



KEY BUSINESS VALUE FINDINGS

Speech enabling technologies improve the customer experience; Voice over the Internet (VoIP) reduces the cost of ownership and increases versatility; enhanced data integration capabilities extend the power of the master database into the contact center and return valuable transaction data to the enterprise; and, innovations in performance analytics dramatically improve ROI.



The challenges for IT, for customer service, and for the service line manager are in defining an implementation strategy that makes sense, selecting technology vendors and products given the myriad choices, and determining the ROI which can be complex and sophisticated. Once underway, the data integration challenges can be daunting, the ability to measure success and determine what is working and what is not can be elusive, and figuring out which applications are best suited to the next generation contact center can be difficult.



IMPLICATIONS AND ANALYSIS

As a result, enterprises are still grossly underutilizing their contact centers, forcing customers, employees and trading partners to use sub-optimal communications channels, and they are struggling and diminished customer satisfaction, and missed opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling. Such factors leave Aberdeen to conservatively estimate that industries are missing out on huge potential savings, sales, and profits each year through inefficient management of the customer contact center.



This benchmark report demystifies the technology options, reveals the ROI, and provides a roadmap to best practices in the development, management, and optimization of the customer contact center.



RECOMMENDATIONS FOR ACTION

In addition to the best-in-class actions, companies should evaluate their processes and ensure they effectively accomplish the following: