Upload
fnetolab
View
126
Download
2
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
A Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper Commissioned By Aspect Software
The Next-Generation Contact Center October 2012
Forrester Consulting
The Next-Generation Contact Center
Page 1
Table Of Contents
Executive Summary ................................................................................................................................................................................. 2
Solid Technology Is A Cornerstone Of A Customer Experience Strategy ................................................................................... 2
Delivering Good Customer Experiences Is Important, Yet Difficult To Do ................................................................................ 5
Customer Service Organizations Are Victims Of Complex Contact Center Technology ....................................................... 11
Evolving To A Next-Generation Contact Center ............................................................................................................................ 15
Conclusion: Four Steps To A Better Customer Experience........................................................................................................... 17
Appendix A: Methodology................................................................................................................................................................... 18
Appendix B: Supplemental Material .................................................................................................................................................. 18
Appendix C: Endnotes .......................................................................................................................................................................... 18
© 2012, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®, Technographics®, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. For additional information, go to www.forrester.com. [1-JX330Y]
About Forrester Consulting Forrester Consulting provides independent and objective research-based consulting to help leaders succeed in their organizations. Ranging in scope from a short strategy session to custom projects, Forrester’s Consulting services connect you directly with research analysts who apply expert insight to your specific business challenges. For more information, visit www.forrester.com/consulting.
Forrester Consulting
The Next-Generation Contact Center
Page 2
Executive Summary
Today, the gap between a customer’s expectations and the service they receive is huge. Customers are increasingly knowledgeable about the products they use and demand value-added, personalized service in real time, using voice, text-based media like email and chat, and social media. They are quick to voice their disappointment about poor customer experiences; social media can amplify these negative views, which can lead to brand erosion.
Businesses know that good service is important: 90% of customer service decision makers tell Forrester that delivering good service is critical to their company’s success; 63% think its importance has risen.1
Businesses must be pragmatic about engaging in initiatives that will deliver service in line with customer expectations at a cost that makes sense to the business. One successful way to help move the needle on an improved customer service experience in a way that is cognizant of business cost parameters is by focusing on the technology that is at the heart of contact centers. Next-generation contact center technology allows you to standardize the customer experience across supported communication channels. It provides agents with a unified desktop so they can simultaneously handle multiple interactions; access customer, product, and history data and content at the right point in an interaction; increase their efficiency; and improve the quality of each interaction. This technology also provides managers the flexibility to access real-time reports and analytics to quickly adapt to changing business demands.
Yet businesses today are battling the ongoing economic pressures of a prolonged global recession. Most companies pragmatically balance the cost of doing business with customer satisfaction.
In addition, improved technology delivers an overall lower cost of ownership. Businesses that fail to focus on their core contact center technology risk being left at a competitive disadvantage. In April 2012, Aspect Software commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate the current trends in next-generation contact center technologies through conducting an in-depth survey with 308 US and Canadian Enterprise Customer Service Strategy Decision Makers.
Solid Technology Is A Cornerstone Of A Customer Experience Strategy
The customer experience is defined as the sum of all experiences a customer has with a company over the duration of their relationship ----- including awareness, discovery, attraction, interaction, purchase, use, customer service, and advocacy. Technology plays a large part in delivering these customer experiences: 73% of survey respondents view technology as playing a large to very large role in their customer experience strategy.2 Equally important is the alignment of a company’s contact center strategy with a company’s customer experience strategy. Forty eight percent say that their contact center strategy is the cornerstone of their customer experience strategy, and 45% are in the process of aligning their contact center strategy to be able to support their customer experience strategy (see Figure 1). It is comforting to know that only 7% of respondents see their contact center as a cost center that is not aligned with their company’s customer experience strategy.
Forrester Consulting
The Next-Generation Contact Center
Page 3
Figure 1 Companies Have Properly Aligned Their Customer Experience Strategy With Their Contact Center Strategy
Base: 308 enterprise customer service strategy decision makers in the US and Canada
Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Aspect Software, June 2012
Barriers That Contact Centers Face Contact center leaders face barriers that prevent their organizations from making better use of technology to improve their contact center capabilities. It is not surprising that cost is by far the largest barrier for all types of contact center leaders (see Figure 2). Secondary barriers include lack of budget, lack of business agility in choosing technologies that can easily adapt to changing business pressures, and user resistance to adopting or better utilizing current technologies. The actual barriers being dependent on the profile of the respondent:
• User adoption and lack of business agility challenge respondents who focus on the customer experience. Respondents who view their contact center as a cornerstone of their customer experience strategy state that the second-most important barrier they face is resistance from technology users (29%) and the third-most important barrier is that it is too difficult to change existing business processes (25%). For respondents who are in the process of aligning their contact center strategy with their customer experience strategy, the same two answers tie for the second-most important barrier they face: 34% say that it is too difficult to change business processes and another 34% say that they face resistance from users of the technology.
Our contact center strategy is a
cornerstone of our customer
experience strategy. Strategic
goals are well aligned
48%
Our customer experience strategy is defined. We are in the process of
aligning our contact center strategy to
our customer experience strategy
45%
Our contact center is seen as a cost
center, and its operational goals
are not aligned with our customer
experience strategy7%
“What is the relationship between your contact center strategy and your customer experience strategy?”
Forrester Consulting
The Next-Generation Contact Center
Page 4
• Lack of budget challenges respondents who view their contact center as a cost center. For respondents who view their contact center as a cost center, the second-most important barrier is no budget (64%) and the third-most important barriers are resistance from users of the technology and the difficulty of changing business processes (32% each).
Figure 2 Organizations View Cost As The Biggest Barrier To Better Using Technology To Improve Contact Center Capabilities
Base: 308 enterprise customer service strategy decision makers in the US and Canada
(multiple responses accepted)
Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Aspect Software, June 2012
1%
21%
10%
9%
16%
16%
23%
25%
29%
17%
51%
1%
12%
18%
11%
15%
24%
14%
34%
34%
24%
61%
0%
0%
9%
23%
18%
14%
18%
32%
32%
64%
77%
Other
None of the above
Unfamiliarity with appropriate professional services providers
Unsupportive CEO or upper management
Difficulty working with IT
Unfamiliarity with appropriate technologies
Incumbent vendor too difficult to replace/contractual obligation to existing vendor
Too difficult to change business processes
Resistance from users of the technology
No budget
Cost is too high
Our contact center is seen as a cost center, and its operational goals arenot aligned with our customer experience strategy. (N = 22)
Our customer experience strategy is defined. We are in the process of aligning ourcontact center strategy with our customer. (N = 140)
Our contact center strategy is a cornerstone of our customer experiencestrategy. Strategic goals are well aligned. (N = 146)
“Which of the following barriers prevent your organization from better usingtechnology to improve your contact center capabilities?”
Forrester Consulting
The Next-Generation Contact Center
Page 5
Delivering Good Customer Experiences Is Important, Yet Difficult To Do
Because of the decline of the economy and the commoditization of products and services, businesses turn to the customer experience as a differentiator in order to stand out from the crowd. In fact, the survey shows that 67% of organizations say that improving customer experiences is one of their top three priorities.3
Figure 3
However, organizations today are investing in better customer experiences in a pragmatic way ----- one that balances the cost of serving customers with a focus on creating a competitive advantage, increasing revenue from expanded product portfolios, and increasing investments in improving online/web customer experiences.
Organizations Have A Well-Balanced Approach To Contact Center Goals
Base: 308 enterprise customer service strategy decision makers in the US and Canada
Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Aspect Software, June 2012
Few Companies Deliver Positive Customer Experiences Even though businesses know that they can reap quantifiable business results by focusing on the customer service experience, few businesses deliver good service. In 2012, Forrester reported that only 37% of companies earned a customer experience index rating of ‘‘excellent’’ or ‘‘good’’ (the index measures the ease, usefulness, and enjoyment of
1%
4%
3%
1%
2%
5%
9%
12%
10%
19%
15%
19%
1%
2%
4%
3%
6%
6%
11%
11%
12%
12%
14%
18%
3%
6%
3%
4%
7%
8%
6%
11%
9%
11%
8%
10%
13%
Catching up to the competition
Offering social channels to customers
Improving the store/branch customer experience
Improving the phone self-service customer experience
Offering a mobile experience to customers
Offering additional communication channels (e.g., email, chat,SMS) to existing customers
Improving the cross-channel customer experience
Improving the experience of interacting with contact centeragents
Improving the profitability of customers
Improving the online/web customer experience
Expanding product offerings to increase revenue potential
Creating competitive advantage
Reducing the costs of serving customers
Most important Second-most important Third-most important
“What will your firm’s three most important contact center goals be over the next 12 months?”
Forrester Consulting
The Next-Generation Contact Center
Page 6
doing business with a company). Almost two-thirds of brands delivered an ‘‘okay’’ to ‘‘very poor’’ customer experience; most telecommunications companies delivered a ‘‘poor’’ or ‘‘very poor’’ experience. Banks, credit card providers, Internet service providers, and health insurance companies had the biggest gap between their top scores and lowest scores, indicating that this segment has a significant number of quantifiable business opportunities.4
It’s evident that delivering good customer experiences is hard. Today’s world is increasingly complex; contact centers need to assist customers with more and more complex products and services and are forced to do so with limited resources. As a result, first call resolution and satisfaction metrics decrease.
In addition, customers expect to be able to connect with contact centers over a range of communication channels and receive consistent experiences across them. They also demand instantaneous service. Forrester data shows that 45% of US adults will abandon an online purchase if they cannot find answers to their questions quickly; 66% say that valuing their time is the most important thing that a company can do to provide them with good customer service; and 29% say that they prefer to engage with customer service online rather than speaking with an agent.5
Specifically, contact center organizations struggle to:
• Use social media effectively when interacting with customers. 58% of survey respondents agree that managing social media inquiries is their top challenge today. Contact centers face an onslaught of social media inquiries, which must be answered effectively to avoid negatively affecting the company’s brand proposition. Contact center organizations lack the applications to effectively manage social media escalations, lack the ability to map social identities to customer records in order to better personalize interactions, and often use immature and inconsistent business processes to respond to customers via social channels.
• Deliver consistent experiences across multiple communication channels. Customers want to use an increasing number of media types when receiving customer service. In the past 12 months, 68% used the phone, 60% used help or FAQs, 54% used email, 37% used chat, 20% used SMS, and 19% used a microblogging platform.6
• Enable customers to use multiple communication channels during a single interaction. Customers expect consistent, value-added answers across all media. They also expect to be able to start an interaction using one type of media and complete it using another without having to restart the conversation. Survey data shows that 43% of organizations struggle to support customers’ multichannel journeys. This is not surprising: Forrester data shows a lack of attention to integrating communication channels to provide a seamless experience; only 21% of organizations plan to do so in 2012.
Contact center agents supporting these media types need access to the same data and information in order to ensure consistent customer experiences. However, over half the survey respondents say that doing so is a challenge.
7
• Manage the workflow of interactions from the front office to the back office. 42% of survey respondents say that they are unable to effectively manage the end-to-end workflow of interactions; this is primarily due to unintegrated applications. This introduces process inefficiencies, affecting productivity and escalating costs.
These communication channels ----- and the agents supporting them ----- are siloed from one another. Agents do not have a full view of prior customer interactions across all supported communication channels, which means that they are unable to personalize and contextualize an answer to a customer request.
Forrester Consulting
The Next-Generation Contact Center
Page 7
Enterprises Recognize The Risk Of Not Getting The Technology Right Contact centers are unique in that the impact, risks, and return on investment of technology are clear. Companies continue to struggle to drive a more effective path to improving contact center systems in a more programmatic fashion instead of using a conservative, incremental approach (see Figure 4). Specifically, they struggle with:
• Poor implementation and technology. Across the board, enterprise managers recognize that their competitors will not sit still. Companies now have the option to drive increased customer support across channels ----- and if they don’t, others will.
• Inconsistent service levels and quality. A poorly architected contact center results in problems that hinder agents from delivering great customer service. It limits supervisors’ and managers’ ability to make the day-to-day tactical decisions required to keep service and quality in line with expectations.
• Loss of efficiency. The ongoing struggle to balance service levels, quality, and efficiency is one of the top concerns when looking at the underlying technology in the contact center.
Figure 4 Risks Of Poor Deployment
Base: 308 enterprise customer service strategy decision makers in the US and Canada
(multiple responses accepted)
Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Aspect Software, June 2012
1%
17%
28%
29%
41%
47%
60%
61%
Other
Penalties for noncompliance
Long agent training times
High agent turnover rates
Customer defection
Internal operational inefficiencies
Inconsistent customer servicedelivery
Competitive disadvantage
“What are the risks of not adopting new technology in the contact center?”
Forrester Consulting
The Next-Generation Contact Center
Page 8
Challenges Also Include People And Business Processes Challenges to delivering good customer experiences are not limited to siloed technology that is unable to support customer expectations (see Figure 5); they also revolve around:
• Staffing --- 57% of survey respondents believe that finding, attracting, and retaining the right workers with the correct skills is the biggest challenge.
• Business processes --- 52% of survey respondents believe that their technology infrastructure is brittle and inflexibly wired together. Changing business processes is their second-biggest challenge.
• Data --- 51% of survey respondents struggle with data challenges; creating a single view of customer data and information is their third-biggest challenge.
Forrester Consulting
The Next-Generation Contact Center
Page 9
Figure 5 Customer Experience Challenges Revolve Around People, Processes, And Data
Base: 308 enterprise customer service strategy decision makers in the US and Canada
(percentages may not total 100 because of rounding)
Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Aspect Software, June 2012
Contact Center Agents And Managers Have Specific Challenges The increasing number of media types, including social media, place a significant burden on contact centers, where agents must understand each customer’s needs and respond to them in a meaningful and personalized way. Contact center organizations know what a good customer experience is, and know what it takes to deliver it. However, the reality is that organizations struggle to empower their customer service agents and managers to deliver good customer experiences. Here are some examples derived from the Forrester survey commisioned by Aspect (see Figure 6):
22%
15%
15%
12%
11%
10%
10%
9%
9%
7%
7%
7%
6%
6%
5%
4%
35%
36%
37%
31%
23%
20%
41%
28%
24%
28%
17%
36%
27%
25%
13%
26%
24%
28%
27%
28%
35%
31%
34%
31%
36%
40%
22%
34%
36%
39%
16%
39%
13%
14%
16%
24%
23%
22%
12%
21%
23%
18%
31%
17%
23%
25%
29%
4%
5%
7%
4%
6%
7%
14%
2%
10%
7%
5%
21%
5%
8%
3%
34%
26%
Finding, attracting, and retaining staff with the correct skills
Creating a single view of customer data and information
Changing existing business processes
Gaining user acceptance of new technologies
Working with IT to adopt new technologies
Lack of budget
Coordinating across different technology platforms
Measuring results
Defining the business case for investment
Working with business users to adopt new technologies
The contact center is not viewed as mission-critical or ofstrategic importance to our company
Managing data quality
Gaining cooperation across the organization to supportcustomer experience management improvement efforts
Creating operational reports to drive decision-making
Unsupportive CEO or upper management
Other
Most challenging — 5 4 3 2 Least challenging — 1
“What are your organization’s biggest challenges to improving the overallcustomer experience that your contact center currently delivers?”
Forrester Consulting
The Next-Generation Contact Center
Page 10
• Contact center agents are not empowered to set their own schedule. 59% of respondents say that they do a suboptimal job of empowering their agents to set their own schedules and manage their own work times; this leads to agent dissatisfaction and increases turnover.
• Contact center agents cannot handle inquiries over multiple media. Customers expect consistent answers across all types of media, personalized for the customer and issue at hand. However, 43% say that agents don’t have the applications in place to handle inquiries submitted over various media types. In addition, 32% say they don’t have access to the right content to answer customer questions consistently and 31% say that agents do not have the relevant customer, order, past product, or past interaction history that would empower them to deliver this value-added service.
• Customer service agents are not empowered with reporting. Customers expect companies to deliver relevant, value-added answers within the published SLAs. Agents lack the tools to monitor their performance across the media types that they support. 52% say that their reporting is suboptimal.
• Contact center managers lack the tools to be able to guarantee quality of service to their customers. 45% of survey respondents say that their managers focus on manual and administrative tasks and don’t have time for strategic initiatives; 43% say that they do not have access to real-time analytics to manage escalations; 36% say that they cannot manage the quality of customer interactions; and 36% say that they do not have access to reports to understand and manage customer satisfaction ratings across all supported media types (see Figure 6).
Forrester Consulting
The Next-Generation Contact Center
Page 11
Figure 6 Contact Center Managers Are Not Empowered With The Right Strategic Technologies To Gain Insights That Drive
Business Results
Base: 308 enterprise customer service strategy decision makers in the US and Canada
(multiple responses accepted)
Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Aspect Software, June 2012
Customer Service Organizations Are Victims Of Complex Contact Center Technology
Today’s contact center technology environment is complex and brittle, comprised of point solutions which are used to manage customer interaction channels, the agent desktop, knowledge management, agent collaboration technologies, and workforce optimization technologies. Little integration exists between these technologies to support multichannel interactions. For example, Forrester data shows that only 21% of companies are actively working on integrating their communication channels.8
17%
28%
31%
36%
36%
43%
45%
Contact center managers do not have access to reports toensure that SLAs and KPIs are being met
Contact center managers do not have workforce managementtools to understand agent utilization and performance
Contact center managers do not have collaboration tools orpresence indicators to easily communicate with their workforce
and subject-matter experts
Contact center managers do not have access to unified reportingfor all communication channels supported to understand the
overall performance of their contact center
Contact center managers cannot effectively monitor the quality ofcustomer interactions
Contact center managers do not have access to real-timeanalytics to promptly manage escalations
Contact center managers focus on manual and administrativetasks like scheduling and coaching and do not have time for
strategic initiatives
“What challenges do your contact center managers face with the contact center technologies that agents use to provide service to customers?”
Forrester Consulting
The Next-Generation Contact Center
Page 12
Challenges Faced During Technology Implementations Once organizations decide to enhance or improve their contact center technologies, the issues they face are quite similar to the barriers preventing them from making the best use of it. This reinforces the idea that a more incremental approach to contact center technology planning and the lack of a solid architecture create problems during the build and operational phases (see Figure 7).
• High costs come out on top ------ again. Enterprises consistently state that they feel that both building and operating contact center technology is expensive; it’s their top concern. Enterprises that view their contact centers as cost centers feel that these expenses are much more of an issue ----- by a margin of 20 to 26 percentage points compared with companies that feel that their contact center has a more strategic value to their organization. This is not only related to the difference between ‘‘cost center’’ and ‘‘strategic component,’’ but also reflects the more limited budgets available to develop a more robust architecture and road map.
• Infrastructure disruption through rollout. Another issue where there is a large difference between the ‘‘cost center’’ and ‘‘strategic component’’ views is the impact an implementation has on a company’s infrastructure. Moving to a next-generation contact center means migrating away from proprietary ----- albeit highly reliable ----- hardware and software combinations. The evolution of contact center technology is away from these legacy architectures and toward more standardized servers and web standards-based software that provides higher levels of integration support and manageability. But this can be more disruptive for cost center-focused contact centers that lack longer range architectural planning.
Forrester Consulting
The Next-Generation Contact Center
Page 13
Figure 7 Implementation Challenges Map To Utilization Issues
Base: 308 enterprise customer service strategy decision makers in the US and Canada
(multiple responses accepted)
Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Aspect Software, June 2012
Implementation Challenges Have An Impact On Agent Capabilities Effective change management is a critical success factor in a contact center technology deployment. Unless the enterprise effectively engages agents in the new capabilities, it will not get a good return on its investment and agents will deliver lower levels of service (see Figure 8). For cost center-focused contact centers, there is a wide difference in the range of implementation issues that impair agent productivity.
• Getting agents up to speed takes too long. Hiring, training, and retaining agents with the right skills is a perennial issue in delivering good customer service; it’s even more problematic for cost center-focused contact centers. For many enterprises, a confusing and poorly designed agent desktop has a critical impact on agent productivity.
0%
1%
19%
23%
20%
23%
25%
24%
30%
37%
40%
55%
47%
2%
2%
16%
25%
20%
22%
19%
21%
35%
27%
42%
54%
53%
0%
0%
18%
9%
27%
23%
27%
41%
32%
36%
41%
45%
73%
Other
Don’t know
Not everyone can have access to the solution
Performance and availability limitations
Infrastructure incompatibility
Unrealized benefits in the expected timeframe
Fear of noncompliance with regulatory policy
Infrastructure disruption through rollout
Longer time and higher resource investment than anticipated
Complex integration among contact center applications
Internal resistance to change
Complex integration with existing infrastructure
High cost of implementation
Our contact center is seen as a cost center, and its operational goals arenot aligned with our customer experience strategy. (N = 22)Our customer experience strategy is defined. We are in the process of aligning ourcontact center strategy with our customer. (N = 140)Our contact center strategy is a cornerstone of our customer experiencestrategy. Strategic goals are well aligned. (N = 146)
“What challenges did you face during your technology implementations?”
Forrester Consulting
The Next-Generation Contact Center
Page 14
• Agents are constrained in delivering consistent service across channels. Multichannel support in most enterprises today is implemented in individual silos, so the agent is confronted with different tools to manage a customer contact. Because these tools are tied to different back-end systems, the business process rules can end up being inconsistent, further impairing the agent’s ability to provide consistent service.
• A poor implementation restricts collaboration. Multichannel customer service increases the need for agents to collaborate to drive first call resolution. This problem will only increase over time, as customers increasingly demand to connect over different channels to process a request.
Forrester Consulting
The Next-Generation Contact Center
Page 15
Figure 8 Challenges Translating Technology To Agent Productivity
Base: 308 enterprise customer service strategy decision makers in the US and Canada
(multiple responses accepted)
Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Aspect Software, June 2012
Evolving To A Next-Generation Contact Center
Today’s contact center managers recognize the competitive challenges and opportunities that delivering consistent service across channels presents. However, only rarely do they have the luxury of starting with a clean slate and a blank check to design, build, and deploy the ideal multichannel contact center. The benefits of improved customer service coupled with better efficiency are achieved only by having a vision and a strategy and translating those elements into a solid plan for a next-generation contact center.
3%
16%
15%
29%
30%
41%
38%
37%
38%
1%
25%
25%
25%
30%
34%
39%
43%
41%
0%
32%
36%
23%
41%
27%
55%
55%
64%
Other
Contact center agents do not have relevant customer or orderhistory to personalize an interaction
Contact center agents don’t have access to relevant and reliable content to answer customer inquiries
Contact center agents don’t have access to the back office to be able to effectively answer questions like “Where is my
order?”
Contact center agents don’t have the context of an inquiry that is escalated to them from a self-service interaction and have to
restart the conversation over with the customer
Contact center agents must use multiple desktops to managevoice, chat, email, and social inquiries, as these inquiries are all
queued differently
Contact center agents do not have an easy way to collaboratewith one another or with subject-matter experts to quickly
resolve problems
Contact center agents cannot easily deliver consistent customerexperiences across communication channels using common
business rules
Training takes too long for contact center agents to becomeproficient
Our contact center is seen as a cost center, and its operational goals arenot aligned with our customer experience strategy. (N = 22)Our customer experience strategy is defined. We are in the process of aligning ourcontact center strategy with our customer. (N = 140)Our contact center strategy is a cornerstone of our customer experiencestrategy. Strategic goals are well aligned. (N = 146)
“What challenges do your contact center agents face with the technologies they use to provide customer service?”
Forrester Consulting
The Next-Generation Contact Center
Page 16
Defining The Next-Generation Contact Center Information technology evolves based on both market need and vendor innovation. Contact centers have moved more slowly than other technology markets because of the very conservative way enterprises buy and deploy it. The move to software-based systems started in the mid-’90s and is still very much a work in progress. Additional stimulus in today’s market comes from rapid innovation and advances in consumer use of new technologies for communications and collaboration. This is the challenge enterprises face in evolving to a next-generation contact center. To move toward the next-generation contact center, enterprise IT architects need to consider a number of attributes:
• Reliability. Because contact centers still largely process voice transactions, they still need to fulfill the requirement of high availability. Downtime directly translates into lost agent productivity and affects customer service levels. This will not go away, so it presents a perceptual barrier for enterprise managers when considering future architectures that are standard server- and software-based. Legacy proprietary systems achieved high reliability by extensive vendor design, testing, and delivery of closed architectures that prevented unanticipated interactions between systems. But this is no longer sustainable today ----- and the market has moved to web standard software-based systems. High reliability can be achieved, but in a different way than contact center managers are familiar with from prior experience.
• Flexibility. A poorly architected contact center creates issues that impair agents from delivering great customer service. Contact centers have historically integrated a number of best-of-breed, proprietary software- and hardware-based components that were difficult and expensive to maintain. Making changes to business rules is also difficult. Many contact center managers simply make do with the existing configuration instead of working to optimize contact flow rules. Finally, reporting from these diverse systems presents the challenge of having many ‘‘sources of the truth’’ and limited analytical abilities.
• Standard software suites versus best-of-breed components. More and more contact center managers are looking to consolidate the range of diverse components in their contact centers by adopting integrated suites. This is in line with the general IT trend to consolidate supplier relationships, but it also attacks the problem of the many integration pain points that plague contact centers.
• Improving the agent, supervisor, and management user experience. As this study has shown, contact center managers understand and are concerned about the negative productivity impact that a poor implementation has on agents, supervisors, and contact center managers. This ties directly to meeting service levels in a cost-effective manner and impairs the contact center from evolving to a true multichannel operation demanded by consumers.
• Standardizing the underlying infrastructure. The integration of voice and data networks onto a common IP infrastructure leveraging SIP signaling sets the stage for a more flexible multichannel contact center. SIP inherently supports multichannel, as it was developed to support all media types of communication ----- not just voice. Contact centers depend heavily on software applications having access to the state of a contact, so the use of the SIP standard has helped enormously to eliminate the complexity of managing multichannel communications on one software platform.
• The ease of integration of common productivity tools. Agents, supervisors, and contact center managers need to use productivity tools to develop documents, collaborate using unified communications, run reports, and
Forrester Consulting
The Next-Generation Contact Center
Page 17
analyze data. Instead of using separate tools specific to each best-of-breed component, today they can leverage commonly available productivity suites for those capabilities.
Conclusion: Four Steps To A Better Customer Experience
Forrester believes that a good customer experience correlates to loyalty and increased lifetime customer wallet share, as measured in three classic categories: willingness to consider the company for another purchase, likelihood to switch business to a competitor, and likelihood to recommend to a friend or colleague.9
Improving the customer experience is also good for internal operations. Companies that have invested in delivering better customer experiences report reduced operational costs, greater productivity of their frontline personnel, and greater business agility ----- a necessary requirement to stay ahead of the competition.
This direct correlation between a good customer experience and positive business value is evident across the more than 40 industries that Forrester surveyed.
Delivering optimal customer experience is a multi-year modernization and transformation project for the contact center that takes a coordinated effort across four dimensions ----- strategy, process, technology, and people management.
• Start by articulating your customer experience strategy. Your customer experience strategy identifies the customers your organization intends to serve and articulates the customer experience you want to deliver across all communication channels and all company touchpoints that are in line with your brand proposition.
• Focus on the right processes for your customers. Processes that customer-facing personnel follow to serve customers have to be consistent across all media types supported, effective in meeting customer requirements, and agile so they can be changed to support a business’ changing needs.
• Choose technologies that empower your agents to deliver excellent experiences. Contact center technologies are at the heart of the solution for providing optimal customer experiences. Contact center technology must be able to standardize the customer service experience across media types, including social media; empower agents with contextual customer, product, and service information; allow agents to easily collaborate to quickly resolve inquiries; and provide managers with the right analytics to track outcomes that have a business impact.
• Focus on the user experience to drive contact center architecture. Not only is it important to design a system that delights consumers, but enterprises must also consider the agent, supervisor, and contact center manager user experience. Developing a solid customer journey map that reflects the enterprise customer experience strategy and vision is important. At the same time, the architectural views of agent, supervisor, and contact center manager must be incorporated into the analysis and design.
• Don’t forget about your people. How people are organized and led are important factors that affect customer service success and make up your organization’s corporate culture, leadership practices, collaboration methods, training programs, and performance measurement approaches. It’s also important to empower your agents to do the right thing for the customer. They are, after all, your most important asset.
Forrester Consulting
The Next-Generation Contact Center
Page 18
Appendix A: Methodology
Forrester conducted an online survey of 308 enterprise customer service strategy decision makers in the US and Canada in June 2012 in order to evaluate the current challenges they face and assess the investments they have made or are planning to make in contact center technologies to overcome those challenges. 89% of survey respondents were from the US; 11% were from Canada. 26% worked for large organizations (1,000 to 4,999 employees); 31% worked for very large organizations (5,000 to 19,999 employees); and 43% worked for organizations with 20,000 or more employees. 19% had 50 to 249 contact center seats within their organization; 22% had 250 to 499 seats; 17% had 500 to 999 seats; 19% had 1,000 to 5,000 seats; and 23% had more than 5,000 contact center seats. Survey respondents had midlevel to-senior-level job titles. 55% of survey participants work in IT/technology groups, while 45% work in business groups. All respondents had direct knowledge of their contact center strategy and operations.
Appendix B: Supplemental Material
Related Forrester Research ‘‘The State Of Customer Experience, 2010,’’ Forrester Research, Inc., February 19, 2010
‘‘Craft Your Contact Center Investment Plans In Light Of Technology Adoption Patterns,’’ Forrester Research, Inc., November 7, 2011
‘‘The Customer Experience Index, 2012,’’ Forrester Research, Inc., January 23, 2012
‘‘Contact Center Purchase Plans 2011,’’ Forrester Research, Inc., October 27, 2011
‘‘The Business Impact Of Customer Experience, 2011,’’ Forrester Research, Inc., July 7, 2011
Appendix C: Endnotes
1 Forrester surveyed 141 customer experience decision makers from large North American firms. 90% said that the customer experience would be either ‘‘very important for’’ or ‘‘critical to’’ their 2010 efforts.
2 Forrester surveyed 308 enterprise customer service strategy decision makers in the US and Canada in June 2012, in a survey commissioned by Aspect. On a scale of 1-5 (where 1 is very low and 5 is very high) 73% of respondents said that their contact center technologies were rated a 4 or 5 as a key component of their company's overall customer experience strategy.
Forrester Consulting
The Next-Generation Contact Center
Page 19
3 Forrester surveyed 308 enterprise customer service strategy decision makers in the US and Canada in June 2012, in a survey commissioned by Aspect. 33% of respondents stated that an improved customer experience is their top priority; 15% stated that it is their second-highest priority; and 19% stated that it is their third most important priority.
4 To assess the state of customer experience in 2012, Forrester fielded its North American Technographics® Customer Experience Online Survey, Q4 2011 (US), which asked 7,638 US consumers about their interactions with a variety of companies. Based on their responses, Customer Experience Index (CxPi) scores were calculated for 160 brands in 13 industries. This year’s rankings show that only about one-third of brands earned ‘‘excellent’’ or ‘‘good’’ CxPi scores, with the rest ranging from ‘‘okay’’ to ‘‘very poor.’’ Retailers and hotels continue to be the two highest-ranking industries, while health insurance providers, TV service providers, and Internet service providers (ISPs) continue to own the cellar.
5 45% of US online consumers agree with the statement that ‘‘I am very likely to abandon my online purchase if I cannot find a quick answer to my questions,’’ and two-thirds agree that ‘‘Valuing my time is the most important thing a company can do to provide me with good online customer service.’’
6 Forrester asked 7,638 US consumers which communication channels they had used to receive customer service in the past 12 months. Source: North American Technographics® Customer Experience Online Survey, Q4 2011 (US).
7 In Forrester’s Forrsights Networks And Telecommunications Survey, Q1 2011, only 21% of buyers indicated that they were going to invest in multichannel integration. This implies that many customer service organizations are going to continue to choose a best-of-breed approach to support multiple channels in their contact centers. This will continue to limit the firm’s ability to report on the full scope of customer interactions across different channels and make business rule changes harder to deploy.
8 Source: Forrsights Networks And Telecommunications Survey, Q1 2011.
9 Years of Forrester data confirm the strong relationship between the quality of a company’s customer experience (as measured by Forrester’s Customer Experience Index [CxPi]) and loyalty measures like willingness to consider the company for another purchase, likelihood to switch business, and likelihood to recommend. That data was used to build simple models that show how changes in loyalty associated with higher CxPi scores can affect a company’s yearly revenue.