Intelligent Enterprise

VentanaView™

Summary

Ventana Research anticipates that the coming year will be one of significant maturation of the contact center. We see it becoming a focal point of renewed technology investment motivated by organizational performance improvement initiatives. We predict this will result in an expanded role for the contact center as a profit center. To achieve this, companies will adopt new technologies like embedded business intelligence capabilities for enabling call center decision making, integration of customer intelligence applications, and outside-in service initiatives aimed at measuring the customer experience. More advanced organizations will embrace increased predictive software aimed at customer retention and anticipatory service offerings.

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Ventana Research maintains that the importance of the contact center for personalizing the organization to its customers and as a foundation for competitive differentiation is beyond critical mass at many organizations. Business issues, financial realities, best practices, and technological capabilities are maturing, along with the acceptance of the contact center as a viable mechanism for managing and effecting performance improvement across the enterprise. Vendors are poised to take advantage of this market shift, often at the urging of their customers.

Contact center performance management has historically been focused on agent productivity. In practice, this is a euphemism for cost reduction, leading to performance metrics like call duration, first-call resolution, cost per interaction, script compliance, and the like. In other words, a great deal of money has been spent pursuing efficiency and minimizing customer contact in order to keep costs in check. This one-sided focus cannot sustain performance in a customer-driven business, particularly in this era of business process outsourcing and offshore migration of the contact center. Agent productivity, process compliance evaluation, training, e-learning, incentives, and recognition are not expected to go away as important issues in the context of contact center performance. Ventana Research does see the agenda slowly shifting, however, from cost control and efficiency improvement only, to one that also embraces performance effectiveness and the nurturing of customer relationships.