Emerging Communication Channels Are Driving a Contact Center Revolution

Dimension Data, a global ICT solutions and services provider, recently announced the results of its 2012 Global Contact Center Benchmarking Report, which includes data collected from 637 contact centers in 72 countries across the Americas, Asia, Australia, Europe, and Middle East and Africa. This year’s report found that rapid adoption of emerging communication channels – much of which is enabled by new mobile and smartphone devices, wireless connectivity and social media – is making a significant impact.

As a result, organizations are now rushing to provide additional service channels as consumers demand varied types of collaboration when they engage with organizations. The telephone is no longer a consumer’s primary point of contact with an organization, while at the same time, mobile and social media interactions are increasingly making the contact center’s role more important than ever.

Click through for highlights from Dimension Data’s “2012 Global Contact Center Benchmarking Report.“

Enabled by mobility but fueled by social media, a customer revolution is imminent. Historically, organizations have set the tone for how and when they interact with customers, but now, customers are determining when and what channel they use –  from the traditional telephone to social media to smartphone applications, and more.

One in five (19.2 percent) contact centers are already managing smartphone applications; 33.1 percent are supporting social media – almost double that reported in 2011; 46.3 percent will be using Web chat to positively direct Internet traffic within 12 months, by which time social media presence will have increased by another 43.5 percent; and Internet capability is now at 79.3 percent.

With the rapidly changing contact center landscape, organizations are wondering how they can effectively facilitate this evolution. The challenge is considerable and often the starting position is weak. 54.5 percent of providers report their current capability is still in a learning and developing phase – only 6.7 percent believe their operations are highly advanced.

Only 27.9 percent of contact centers are measuring Internet interaction costs, 19.4 percent of Web chat, 9.9 percent of social media and 6.1 percent of smartphone applications.

Of the companies using a self-service channel such as speech, SMS, Web chat or social media, nearly half don’t collect any customer feedback.

Since the 2011 report, cloud has doubled in importance, with flexibility and compliance with enterprise technologies serving as the driving force. However, organizations will need to find a way to use, re-use and upgrade existing technologies. Any cloud migration will likely be gradual, and done with the appreciation that cloud is not an all or nothing decision.