Contact Center Agent Performance Optimization End-User Survey: Industry Report

Contact Center Agent Performance Optimization End-User Survey

Product Type: Market Research Report
Published by: Frost & Sullivan
Published: September 2006
Product Code: R1-5203

Description

Research Overview

This Frost & Sullivan research service titled Contact Center Agent Performance Optimization End-User Survey gauges current and future adoption of contact center products and services in the U.S. market. Frost & Sullivan presents several findings that will help vendors, service providers, and end users make well-informed strategic decisions. Areas of focus include multi-channel contact center, agent performance optimization, hosted contact center, and customer care outsourcing.

Technologies

The following technologies are covered in this research:

Blended Environment: Agents in a blended environment will be skilled in handling both inbound and outbound calls.
Multi-skilled Agents: Multi-skilled agents have more than one skill and can handle multiple call types such as service, sales, other languages, and several programs.
Performance Management: Performance management products enable the creation of a unified view of metrics and measures based on data gathered from data sources such as automatic call distribution (ACD), IVR, quality monitoring, workforce management, HR systems, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
Quality Monitoring: Quality-monitoring software allows call centers to record, retrieve, and analyze agent-customer interactions (voice and screens) to monitor and enhance quality of customer care.
Speech Analytics: Speech analytics products help obtain intelligence contained within agent-customer phone conversations to enhance performance.
Workforce-management Software: Workforce-management software allows contact centers to predict the number of calls coming into the contact center and match them with the right number of agents with the right skill sets.
Hosted contact Center: Hosted contact center service providers host the contact center infrastructure and lease out functionalities, applications, and features. The end user typically pays a usage-based fee for the service.

Market Overview

Providers of Contact Center Applications Must Cater to Varied Priorities and Preferences to Improve Sales

As enterprises upgrade their contact center infrastructure and applications as well as consider outsourcing and hosted services, providers of these services will have to take into account several priorities, preferences, and objections of end users. While some companies choose hosted contact center solutions for the ease of provisioning as well as managing multi-site and remote agents, some others prefer performance management systems for their ability to optimize existing investments and offer insights into contact center performance.

Telephone continues to be the most preferred contact channel, while e-mail is gaining popularity. However, the penetration of speech recognition software is still low and most interactive voice recognition (IVR) systems are still touch-tone based. "Nearly 35 percent contact centers have implemented speech recognition in their IVR systems," says the analyst of this research service. "Almost 48 percent of those that have not, plan to do so over the next two years."

Contact Centers to Integrate Contact Channels to Improve Customer Satisfaction

Although most contact centers have not yet integrated their contact channels, several intend to remedy this over the next two years to gain a unified knowledge of customers. Integrating contact channels will help contact centers deliver a consistent, seamless user experience across channels.

"Low usage of new technologies could partly be attributed to weak functionality of deployed applications," notes the analyst. "While implementing these technologies, contact centers must focus not only on cost reduction but also on improving the quality of the customer interaction to provide a positive customer experience."

Table of Contents

1. Agent Performance Optimization End-User Survey
   1. Overview
        1. Executive Summary
    2. Survey Details
        1. Methodology
        2. Demographics
    3. Survey Results
        1. Agent Performance Optimization
    4. Conclusions
        1. Conclusions/Implications
    5. Appendix
        1. Definitions

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