Industry Research

Published 2013

In late 2012, ICMI reached out to their network of contact center professionals to better understand the community’s Mobile Customer Service Strategy for 2013. The survey reached a broad audience and effectively received responses from contact center leaders that have already implemented mobile customer service, those that have no plans or are unsure of where to start, and those who are in the throes of the building stages. The results revealed great insights into the importance of the Mobile Customer Service Strategy for all contact centers, regardless of how their company is currently approaching mobile.

Purchase this report to gain detailed statistics on these key findings:

• The current state of mobile and the competitive landscape
• The expectations of the mobile customer
• The motivators driving companies to implement a Mobile Customer Service Strategy
• The impact of shared ownership on the Mobile Customer Service Strategy
• The role of self-service and the live agent in mobile customer service
• The technology options and customer adoption
• The challenges the contact center should anticipate when implementing mobile customer service

In order for contact center leaders to effectively implement a Mobile Customer Service Strategy, Executive buy-in will be required.

Almost half (46.2%) of survey respondents don’t know if their company has Executive level buy-in for a Mobile Customer Service Strategy, while another 22.1% are certain they don’t have it.

Research within this report is intended to provide contact center professionals with the data they need for a successful Mobile Customer Service Strategy – from securing Executive-level sponsorship, to anticipating implementation challenges, to preparing the contact center, the agents, and the customers for mobile customer support.

19 Pages, PDF download (requires Adobe Acrobat or Reader)

Sponsored by

Published 2012

At the start of 2012, ICMI surveyed call center professionals to understand the major drivers of contact center attrition. The research examined agent salaries, contact center attrition goals and tools deployed to improve the agent’s daily work life.

Purchase this report to gain the statistics you need to get executive-level support on these key findings:

• The cost of agent attrition  
• Causes of agent attrition 
• Agent ROI  
• Tools for improving the agent experience and ROI 
• Agent rewards 
• How centers are measuring agent satisfaction 

Here’s a snapshot of what you will learn:

For most call centers, agent workforce is the largest budget item. The cost to hire a new agent ranges from $1,000 – $3,000 for 35.9% of survey respondents, and over $3,000 for 46% of respondents.

11 Pages, PDF download (requires Adobe Acrobat or Reader)

Sponsored by

Published 2012

In 2012, ICMI surveyed call center professionals to understand contact centers’ short and long-term goals and investment trends. This survey revealed new insights into short- and long-term goals and investment trends, including increasing complexity, agent management attrition and a growing need for customer data.

Two of the survey’s significant findings were the lack of a unified response to the question of what is considered a priority, as well a strong uniformity in the ranking of those priorities. In the former case, a plurality of 39.4% chose the response of focusing on revenue-adding and increased customer loyalty. Of five answer options for ranking contact-center priorities (lowering operating costs, increase customer satisfaction, increase agent productivity, increase sales and profitability and meet service level agreements), the average responses (on a 1-to-5 scale) clustered around the 3.3-to-3.86 range, indicating that, on average, contact centers consider all five options to be of slightly more-than-medium importance, with increasing customer satisfaction leading the pack.

Purchase this report to gain detailed statistics on these key findings: 

• What is important in 2012
• Investments companies are planning to make to achieve 2012 priorities
• How increased complexity is affecting call center performance
• What will be different in the call center in 5 years 
• Top priorities in the call center

8 Pages, PDF download (requires Adobe Acrobat or Reader)
 

Sponsored by

Published November 2011

One of the most significant shifts in the history of the contact center is now occurring: Companies can now have a fully functional multichannel contact center without having to issue an RFP or but hardware and software. But the fully integrated contact center in the cloud doesn't have much of a track record yet. This benchmark research uncovered the best practices being used by companies in deploying and managing these contact centers and identified issues encountered.

Ventana Research undertook this benchmark research to acquire real-world information about levels of adoption, trends and best practices in organizations’ use of contact center systems in the cloud. It explores how they do this now for communications technologies, business applications and analytics systems, how people feel about the current processes and tools, plans they have to change or improve them, and what benefits they hope to gain by doing so.
 

The research confirmed that organizations are moving to the cloud now and will accelerate the pace of doing so over the next two years. Organizations still need to invest in their centers but are operating under tight budgets; cloud-based systems offer a way to gain new capabilities while saving on capital costs, slowing obsolescence and reducing dependence on scarce IT resources. Some companies have already made this transition, and this benchmark research shows that more are about to follow. However, using the cloud poses challenges as well as opportunities. As more vendors demonstrate that their products can address these issues, adoption rates are increasing.

Published November 2011

Ventana Research has completed research to benchmark organizations' use of customer analytics. The research assessed organizational  maturity by examining the adequacy of people, process, information and technology competencies required to make the most effective and efficient use of analytics. The findings offer significant new insights into how analytics and the measures and metrics they provide are used to understand customers and shape strategies to keep them satisfied and loyal.

The research found organizations using a variety of customer analytics, but most of those in use focus on cost-related operational issues rather than bottom-line business issues. This emphasis on internal efficiency rather than business effectiveness was a main reason our Maturity Index analysis found only 18 percent of organizations able to reach the highest Innovative level of maturity. Another key factor was the ineffectiveness of the analytics process in many organizations: Almost three-quarters of them spend most of their time in the analytics process in unproductive activities such as waiting for data, reviewing it for quality and consistency, and preparing it for analysis. And it takes 70 percent of organizations one to two weeks to provide updated metrics and KPIs to people.

Published March 2011

Ventana Research carried out research into the maturity of contact centers worldwide. The results confirmed the importance of technology in the operation of contact centers. In the simplest terms, a contact center consists of agents and technology. Despite the fact that most agent receive minimal compensation, they represent the majority of the ongoing cost of running a center. To keep costs as low as possible, companies have turned to technology in effort to automate as many of the processes as possible and to keep one-to-one calls with agents to a minimum. Yet this research showed that many companies have limited budgets to deploy more advanced technologies that would address these issues. Based on reactions to that study, Ventana decided to examine what contact center technologies companies are using, which of their business expectations for their centers remain unfulfilled and what technologies they are considering to resolve these issues.

This Ventana research report looks at the current and future use of:

• Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)
• Intelligent call routing (ICR)
• Agent workforce management (AWFM)
• Agent desktop management and business intelligence (BI)
  

The research findings in this report will help managers understand better how to use interaction management technologies, help IT departments understand how they can better deploy technology to serve their in-house clients and give vendors a clear picture of the needs of user companies in the market.

Published February 2012

Customer satisfaction has become a key business driver. Companies need to define new, innovative methods for improving customer experience. Ventana conducted this benchmark research to uncover the innovations in CRM used by companies such as yours in deploying and managing innovative customer relationship management maturity models and identify issues you've encountered in the process. The research will help you to uncover trends and identify best practices.

Published March 2011

Ventana Research is the first research company to benchmark the maturity and direction of contact center technology to support customer services processes. Ventana Research believes that enterprise-wide customer interaction and satisfaction processes are essential to managing customer experience in today's competitive markets. With appropriate contact center technologies and use of common customer information, companies can improve operational performance, coordinate consistent interactions across functional, departmental and divisional lines, reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction.

Ventana Research has undertaken a comprehensive benchmark of the adoption and use of contact center technology. They assessed how organizations are operating today and how they plan to advance their contact center strategies and processes through use of technology and information. This research will help contact centers to better understand how to improve their efforts. It will enable them to determine how to align their organization's people, processes, information and technology to improve contact centers and the interactions with customers. Ventana Research and ICMI believe that with proper planning and execution, companies that deploy multi-channel contact center technology can achieve a competitive advantage.

Published August 2011

Ventana Research completed research to benchmark organizations' use of analytics in contact centers. The research assessed organizational  maturity by examining the adequacy of people, process, information and technology competencies required to make the most effective and efficient use of analytics. The findings offer significant new insights into how analytics and the measures and metrics they provide are used by contact centers. It found that most organizations are not very mature in their use of analytics in the contact center. In our view, companies can do more to improve the way they provide efficiency metrics and most have yet to devise effectiveness metrics. The research indicates that a narrow focus on cost is obstructing improvement in customer service and the customer experience. Moreover, it makes clear that the timeliness of both metrics and the underlying data is increasingly an issue for companies.

Join Richard Snow, VP  and head of the Customer and Contact Center Research practice at Ventana Research, as he details the research findings and helps you to understand how organizations are innovating in their use of contact center  analytics.

Published June 2011

Ventana Research and ICMI believe that enterprise-wide customer interaction and satisfaction processes are essential to managing customer experience in today’s competitive markets. With appropriate customer experience management technologies and use of common customer information, companies can improve customer performance, coordinate consistent interactions across functional, departmental and divisional lines, reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction.

Ventana Research has undertaken a comprehensive benchmark of the adoption and use of customer experience management. Ventana assessed how organizations are advancing their customer management strategies and processes through use of technology and information. This research will help executives and managers to better understand how to improve their customer experience management efforts. It will enable them to determine how to align their organization’s people, processes, information and technology to improve customer performance. Ventana Research believes that with proper planning and execution, companies that deploy customer experience management can achieve a competitive advantage.