Are We Making Progress?
Author: Gary Barnett
It’s been about a year since I made my 2007 predictions, and I was thinking it might be fun to take a look back and see if my trusty crystal ball was accurate.
Last year, I stated that contact centers would take new approaches in four specific areas: Unified, performance management, agent retention, and self service. Those forecasts were pretty much on target, and I think all of these trends will continue to gain momentum this year.
In 2007, we saw a big growth in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), which enabled companies to begin deploying solutions to unify their contact center technologies and to centralize capabilities, such as reporting, routing, administration and workflow management. Over the course of the year, I heard many customers say that they like the single vendor, one-stop shopping approach because it reduces costs over the long term, lowers risk, and gives them the ability to adopt session initiation protocol (SIP)-based VoIP at their own pace, as their needs dictate, and budgets allow. In 2008, more contact centers will adopt VoIP and move toward a unified approach.
Performance management was another hot area last year. Over the course of 2007, many of our customers asked specifically for the features and functionality that performance management provides, though they may not have been entirely familiar with performance management concept. Our customers were searching for things like automated and customizable dashboards that show at-a-glance summaries of performance; automated goal setting, performance tracking and agent coaching capabilities; and temporal tracking of employee organization data as it changes over time. This is only the beginning. I believe that over the next year we will see the increased use of true performance management.
Agent retention, a big theme across the board in 2007, remains the biggest challenge facing contact centers today. Last year we saw more of a focus on retention as companies attempted to improve work environments. They used tools, such as workforce management and quality management to give their agents more input and control, but they also had help from somewhat shaky economies in North America and Europe, which made contact center personnel a bit more content to stay in their current roles. Most contact centers realized a slight improvement in attrition rates over the course of last year, but they will continue to focus on this area in 2008.
My final prediction for last year was that we would see steady implementation of speech. Aspect Software completed a large number of speech implementations in 2007 as our customers aimed to simplify self service for their customers. I believe that more contact centers will take advantage of this technology in the coming year as they aim to simultaneously improve customer satisfaction and cut costs.
