?Contact centres need to hone skills as caller demands soar?

Contact centers need to raise the skill levels to meet the changing expectations of the Web 2.0 customers. A joint report by Datacraft and Dimension Data on ?Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report 2008? indicates that over the last ten years, customer service levels have fallen significantly as the expectations of the new customer has changed.

The report, that accounts 32% of samples from Asia-Pacific, 33% from Europe and UK and 25% from Africa and the Middle East, indicates that the average time to answer a call has risen from 23 to 39 seconds. The percentage of calls answered within 10 seconds has fallen from 72 % to 63.5%, and the average time taken to respond to a message left by customers has risen from 11 hours to a staggering 20 hours.

Karina Majid, general manager, customer interactive solutions, Datacraft Asia, says, ?In APAC, customers tend to wait longer for a query till about 60 seconds while in the other regions, customers drop within 15 seconds. The contact centre needs to raise the skill levels to meet the changing expectations of the Web 2.0 customer. Use of instant messaging for real time decision and other collaborative co-browsing channels need to be adopted by the contact centers.?

The report points out that 69% of centres are still not incentivising their customers to use lower cost channels. Self-service can mean real cost benefits in lower interaction costs.

The overall average cost of an IVR (interactive voice response) self service transaction is about $4, while telephone agent-assisted transactions average at about $34.

Today?s contact centres are still charging customers the same fees for using self service instead of agent assisted channels.

The report also mentions that contact centres need to work on developing policies on incentives and career development to encourage staff retention.

The contact centre industry has older workforces who are better skilled and are seeking greater challenges, yet show little success in developing careers and retaining talent. According to Majid, ?In the Asia-Pacific, at the agent level, attrition rate is 31% vs the global average of 27%.

The ability to retain staff is very urgent else and all the tasks today of back-filling and time taken to become operationally skillful will become more difficult.?