Donna Fluss is the founder and President of DMG Consulting LLC, a firm specializing in customer-focused business strategy, operations and technology services for Global 2000 and emerging companies. Ms. Fluss is a recognized thought leader and innovator in CRM, contact center and real-time analytics. For over 25 years, she has helped end users build world-class differentiated contact centers.

2010 Contact Center Trends

2009 was a very important year for the contact center market, one in which the groundwork was laid for valuable changes that are expected in 2010. We went into 2009 knowing very little about unified communications (UC), and, while its full value proposition is not yet clear, enterprises are beginning to appreciate the need to understand it better before making major investments in telephony, messaging or mobile infrastructure. They also recognize that presence, a key feature of session initiation protocol (SIP), is an application that will likely benefit their organization.

2009 was a year in which hosted/software as a service (SaaS) based contact center infrastructure achieved market acceptance. While its adoption rate was only 2.2% of all contact center seats as of the end of 2008, DMG expects the number of hosted contact center seats to grow by 35% during 2010. (See DMG's 2009 Hosted Contact Center Infrastructure Market Report.) DMG is also seeing a great deal of demand for workforce management on a hosted basis, and other contact center solutions are starting to be implemented as SaaS solutions.

Analytics Picks up Momentum

Analytics is beginning to play an increasingly important role in contact centers. It is an emerging area that includes many different applications: quality assurance, desktop analytics, IVR analytics, and performance management to better manage contact center operations; and speech, real-time, predictive, customer experience, Web, customer feedback and customer value analytics to gain customer insights. 2010 is expected to be a very good year for a number of these applications. Speech analytics, which structures unstructured phone conversations in order to identify customer needs and insights, is expected to grow by 40% during 2010. As importantly, speech analytics will start to expand beyond the boundaries of contact centers, as managers in other enterprise areas, such as marketing and operations, realize its potential for helping them achieve important goals like generating revenue, retaining customers and reducing operating expenses.

In 2010/2011, DMG anticipates that desktop analytics, an internally-oriented solution that captures, tracks and analyzes everything that happens on an agent's desktop, will start to see significant adoption. Over the next few years DMG also expects to see increasing use of predictive analytics. All of these analytical solutions and more will be instrumental in improving the performance of contact centers and helping them extend their reach, contributions and influence within enterprises.

In the coming year, the industry is going to see enterprises make significant investments in building multi-channel contact centers with standardized technology and processes to handle all types of customer transactions. (Most contact centers today handle various channels on a soloed basis, which is costly and frustrates customers.)

Mobile Technologies Enter Contact Centers

The adoption of mobile technologies is another important trend. Mobile devices are not yet commonly used within the contact center, but market innovation during the past 2 years has made them viable tools that are expected to be leveraged starting in 2010. Many contact centers are also struggling to figure out how to incorporate the short message service (SMS) channel into their operations.

Social Network is Changing the Game

Social networking is another trend that came to the forefront in 2009; it is here to stay and will have a major impact on all enterprises and their service infrastructures in the year ahead, and beyond. Though Twitter may be just a fad that will not have for a lasting impact on enterprises, other new media capabilities are bound to come around that force even the most traditional service organizations to either adapt or lose their customers to more flexible companies.

Self-Service to the Rescue

Lastly, self-service received a huge amount of attention and investment in 2009, and this will continue into 2010. Many enterprises, feeling pressure to reduce contact center operating costs, have looked to increase the use of their self-service applications. During 2010, enterprises will invest in optimizing the performance of their voice self-service solutions. This will vastly improve the quality of these applications, increasing customer satisfaction while enhancing automation rates, thereby reducing contact center operating expenses. Improved Web-based self-service solutions and better offerings from speech-enabled IVR vendors, particularly the hosted and managed service providers, have enabled this market to come on very strong. Enterprise senior management no longer takes IVR solutions for granted; instead, they see these applications as a way to continuously enhance operating environments inside and outside of the contact center.

2010 is expected to be a better year for contact center investments. Budgets will still be tight, but a growing number of enterprises with critical needs will be willing to make selective investments when the value proposition and ROI are strong.

Free Online Webinar

Less is the new more in 2010: Best practices for spending less time and money to deliver outstanding contact center results

Tuesday, March 2, 2010, 1:00 pm ET

In an era where contact centers are often undermanned and under funded, managers need to get the job done with less resources despite ever increasing demands on their time. In this Webinar, Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting and Ralph Barletta, president of KnoahSoft will discuss the contact center trends and technologies that are helping managers save money and time. This webinar will provide listeners with practical and actionable recommendations for addressing many of these "hot topics." The webinar will address:

• Contact Center Analytics - The value of speech analytics, desktop analytics and customer feedback to lower the time spent doing QA while increasing its effectiveness
• Multi-Channel Contact Centers - Efficient deployment of voice, chat, email and self service channels can significantly lower overall contact rates and costs while increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. As more mobile device driven consumers are demanding these additional channels, contact centers must be equipped to respond to ensure their company's success.
• Proactive Customer Care Initiatives - Low cost, automated outbound IVR, email and SMS can be used to head off customer issues before they become a problem. Proactive customer service changes the cost dynamics while greatly improving service.
• Integrated Tools For Quality Management - There is a growing need for integrated, efficient and cost-effective quality management tools that support the needs of contact center managers and supervisors as they work to consistently provide an outstanding customer experience. Minor improvements in efficiency through tools can add up to less headaches and lower costs to support already overworked managers.

Register for this webinar which will provide detailed steps to improve quality and customer service, utilize valuable agent metrics, increase revenue and maximize resources within your contact center without breaking the bank.

Register Now

A Benchmarking Study of 2010 Enterprise, Contact Center and IT Priorities and the Critical Role of IVRs in Achieving These Goals

Accelerating Contact Center QA and Performance Optimization with Screen Analytics

2009-2010 Quality Management/Liability Recording (Workforce Optimization) Product and Market Report

The first six months of 2009 have been relatively tough for the WFO vendors. After at least 8 straight years of market growth, revenue decreased for every segment of the WFO market, from contact center recording to video recording. While the performance of the WFO market was not stellar, it still outpaced most other contact center and IT segments during the first half of the year. Overall revenue for the vendors in this sector fell by only 1.6%, from $1,336.2 million in the first half of 2008 to $1,315.5 million in the first half of 2009.Learn More.

Question:

How can I define the intangibles on a return on investment (ROI) for quality monitoring in our contact center?

Answer:

Most companies have approval guidelines for technology investments. The guidelines are almost always based on "hard" quantifiable benefits. Examples of hard quantifiable benefits that can be used to justify an investment in a quality monitoring application include: reduction in agent average handle time, reduction in carrier fees, reduction in number of transactions received, increase in first call resolution rate, reduction in hold time, reduction in transferred calls, etc. These are all categories that can be measured and tracked. In general, chief financial officers (CFOs) will approve investments that are based on quantifiable cost savings. Additionally, some CFOs will approve investments that are based on cost avoidance, while others will not.

"Soft" intangible ROI benefits can be significant for some investments, but are generally hard to quantify and measure. For this reason, most CFOs will not approve investments based on "soft" criteria. When investment dollars are limited, which is often the case during a recession, it becomes even more important to base a project's benefits on categories that the enterprise prioritizes, such as an increase in revenue, decrease in customer attrition or productivity improvements. Soft ROI benefits can be used to augment a business case (return on investment analysis), but should not be used alone.

While an investment that is justified based on quantifiable benefits is more likely to be approved, intangible benefits are often very significant, even if they are difficult to measure. Quality monitoring applications, when used properly, deliver both quantifiable and intangible benefits.

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