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Study Shows 95% of Companies Value High Quality Customer Experience

COPC Inc. (Customer Operations Performance Center Inc.) and SOCAP International (Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals) released results of their benchmarking study for customer care. The findings reveal detailed customer satisfaction data for the household/personal care, food/beverage, retail/consumer goods, pharmaceutical/ medical devices and travel/hospitality industries.

Participants in the benchmarking survey include a range of more than 40 companies across five verticals with combined annual revenue of over $170B. Beginning in January 2009, COPC Inc. conducted in-depth surveys with participating SOCAP members to measure 10 key customer satisfaction and operational categories such as complaint management, quality monitoring and operational metrics. Out of the companies surveyed, key findings reveal:

98% provide customer service and/or post sales support

80%-plus utilize more than one support type

21% don't measure customer satisfaction

24% measuring customer satisfaction do not consistently achieve defined performance targets

65% have an external customer service center

95% have a quality monitoring process

89% do not utilize offshore support sites

33% use "temporary" agents to reflect the degree of seasonality in their business

[Full Article] Apr-26-2009

Report Shows how Contact Centers can Protect Investments while Migrating to All-in-One Communications Software Suites

BenchmarkPortal, an independent research firm specializing in contact center best practices, has published a report showing how contact centers can protect existing investments, while making a phased migration to all-in-one communications software suite solutions. The report builds on previous research that demonstrates total annualized costs for all-in-one communications software suites can be less than half that of multipoint solutions following acquisition.

Key findings from the report include the following:

There is a sizeable experience base of contact centers that have migrated to all-in-one communications software suites over time.

Migration to all-in-one communications software suites is generally no more difficult, and is frequently less difficult, than other IT initiatives within contact centers.

Approximately four out of five managers with multipoint solutions feel that a gradual migration strategy would make adoption of an all-in-one communications software suite more attractive.

There is not a unique roadmap, but rather a matrix of considerations that contact centers should take into account when considering migration to an all-in-one communications software suite. These include:

Age of existing multipoint solutions

Degree to which multipoint solutions are embedded into existing infrastructure, processes and customer-facing technologies

Management's knowledge and resources for handling technology migration

Human and cultural factors

Budget

Number of remote offices

Overall technology roadmap

[Full Article] Apr-26-2009

IT Reacts to Global Recession with a 'Back to Basics' Agenda

While the hype in manufacturers' brochures and web sites is all about the "new, new things," IT decision-makers buffeted by the global recession are setting their priorities on the basics -- backup and recovery, security, and even more server consolidation. This conclusion is based on a study this month covering 1,500 IT decision-makers in 12 countries, conducted by RONIN Corporation, a global research and marketing consulting firm.

The study's objective was to check out the "pulse" of the marketplace in terms of the impact that the recession is having on companies and how this, in turn, is impacting IT. The bottom line is that although IT departments are impacted a little less than their companies as a whole, they are changing their priorities and reducing their spending.

A typical company expects to be spending 15% less on IT than in 2008. 6% of this reduction will be in external spending -- with hardware vendors, software companies and the like -- and 9% will be reductions on internal expense. Internal cost saving will come from hiring freezes, layoffs and improvement in the cost structure of the data center.

There are also fundamental changes in the IT adoption of new technologies. In 2005, 47% of IT groups believed they had an environment which was either "leading edge" or "advanced." By 2008, this had dropped to 25% and in 2009 is expected to drop further to 18%. Thus 82% of companies expect to have an IT environment which is either "mainstream" or worse. This has manifested itself in a "back to basics" approach where spending is devoted to the infrastructure -- backup and recovery, security, server consolidation and virtualization. Only 5% of companies are viewing SOA or cloud computing as a spending priority for 2009.

Another major change is in the way that executive management views IT. In 2008, 48% of executives viewed IT as "a service to the company" and only 20% viewed it as "a cost to be controlled." In 2009, this has changed with "a service to the business" dropping 8 points to 36% and "cost to be controlled" jumping up 13 points to 33% of the total.

[Full Article] Apr-26-2009

Software Developers Embrace Social Networking

Three-quarters of all software developers belong to at least one social network and two-thirds belong to multiple networks, according to the results of Evans Data’s Developer Relations Program Annual survey. The survey of over 400 software developers examined the dynamics of evolving program sites for software developers.

Additionally, the top three things developers look for in a social network are profiles, an active community and high quality content. Tagging and access from mobile phones were the least important attributes of a social networking site.

Other highlights from this in-depth survey include:

Over 90 percent of developers look at blogs at least some time, and seventy percent feel that blogs are credible sources of information,

Microsoft has the best developers website according to 27.4% of developers, followed by Sun with 12%. IBM and Google tie for third place with less than ten percent of developers mentioning their site as the best developer website.

Developers prefer community moderated forums to vendor moderated ones, and 88% think that community moderated forums are important in a community website.

[Full Article] Apr-19-2009

IP Contact Centers: Customer Retention has become the Key Benefit

Traditional contact center infrastructure vendors face few greenfield opportunities in the large enterprise market in mature geographies. This, according to independent market analyst Datamonitor, has caused them to change their sales and marketing strategies, focusing much less on the benefits of the transition from time division multiplexing (TDM) to internet protocol (IP) and much more on topics such as unified communications (UC) for the contact center and ways to connect the enterprise with the branch and the contact center. The report says that IP contact center vendors have begun to offer unified product lines, aiming for common administration and reporting, common user interfaces and functionality far beyond basic routing.

An IP contact center is any contact center that does not use traditional circuit switching; that is, all calls are voice-over-IP or are converted from TDM to IP. An IP contact center leverages the intrinsic benefits of IP communications, including the fact that either or both voice and data communications can be efficiently routed to any customer service agent with access to an IP connection. Through the use of SIP, IP contact centers can detect and route customer communications based on SIP-controlled presence management in place of the traditional automatic call director (ACD).

The sluggish economy has led to a change in strategy in the contact center: the focus has shifted from customer acquisition to customer retention. Clients' budgets are tightening and consumer confidence is in decline along with consumer spending. This is making it difficult for enterprises to gain new business, and they are concentrating on current customers, improving customer service and seeking out contract renewals and upgrade opportunities. Customer service quality and customer intimacy are becoming increasingly important to achieve good customer loyalty rates.

Core IP contact center features and functions are important and customers still consider functionality when making their purchasing decisions. But, the difference between choosing vendor A and vendor B rarely comes down to which technology provider can implement specific-agent recall routing rules or which one has a scripting engine for canned email responses.

[Full Article] Apr-19-2009

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