Author:  Gary Barnett

At the beginning of each year, I enjoy making predictions about the business and contact center priorities I expect to see during the coming months.  I believe that in 2007 company executives will increase their focus on the contact center as a source of revenue generation, and place more emphasis on the contact center as the predominant way to retain customers.  In order to achieve these objectives, contact centers will focus on the following trends.  While some of these ideas have been gaining momentum for a few years, in 2007 I expect contact centers will approach all of these trends with fresh eyes, incorporating new technologies that will accelerate acceptance. 

Unified – companies that are migrating to VoIP are beginning to take a more complete view of their customers and focus on customer experiences from the consistency and ease of use perspective.  In 2007, the Unified approach will be largely driven by VoIP, a focus on contact centers as a revenue platform, outsourcing, and overall costs.

Performance management – contact centers managers currently have a significant amount of data available to them.  The new year brings with it the ability for managers and executives to access information in different ways, and to use that data more efficiently to determine where their companies really stand with customers and to more effectively reach both service and financial targets.

Agent retention – hiring and training agents and customer service representatives is expensive.  In 2007, contact centers will focus on retaining agents by improving work environments by focusing on technology such as workforce management or quality management solutions. 

Self service - also in the coming year, we will see the continued adoption of speech as companies look at incorporating more speech into self service; and, a closer tie between the web and contact center self service so that customers can start with self service on the web and end up in the contact center.

Do these match your contact center’s New Years resolutions? 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 at 8:02 am and is filed under Analytics Tools, Voice Self Service, Sales and Telemarketing, Collections, Customer Service/Consumer Demands, Performance Optimization, Contact Center Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.