Trends in Company-Client/Government-Citizen Interaction   

MEXICO CITY (February, 2005). Here at Corsidian we have identified a series of trends that will influence the direction of the efforts made in the contact center industry over the next five years. These trends are grouped under the umbrella of three principal premises that are their drivers or trend generators.

These drivers are:

Improvement in the processes for the acquisition, retention, and satisfaction of clients, whether private companies or government institutions.

Several studies have shown the impact that these practices can have on organizations' results, as mentioned by Bain & Co in a study that demonstrated that a 5% improvement in processes for customer retention improves the profitability of organizations by between 25% and 100%.

Equally, publications such as Harvard Business Review have commented that eliminating only 5% of the failings in attention and solution to clients' problems increases profits by between 25% and 95%.

Nevertheless, this will not be an easy process: data produced by Meta Group show that 70% of CRM projects "fail due to the expectations originally presented."

In order to face this trend, Corsidian has created an area that specializes in CRM and whose aim is to work with the different types of organizations from multiple sectors, such as banking, telecommunications, retail, tourism, and many others. The aim is to integrate the best practices in the market and the organizations themselves in their areas of interaction with customers through remote channels, focused primarily on the telephone and Internet.

The second driver of trends in the contact center industry will be the opening of new remote services or offerings through multichannel integration, which has been made possible through the interaction of media such as mail, chat, telephone, and voice recognition, etc. Using these platforms, companies will be able to offer services that previously could not be offered, were not offered expeditiously, or were offered at high cost. Purdue University identified one example of this, stating that advanced voice recognition reduces call time by approximately 35% over traditional tone systems.

Then there are commentaries such as that of Allied Business Intelligence (ABI), which projects that the voice recognition market grew from US$677 million in 2002 to US$897.8 million in 2003, while it is predicted that this market could reach around US$5.3 billion by 2008.

Regarding multichannel integration, Phillips Infotech has stated that 46% of contact center workstations will be based on IP multichannel platforms by the end of 2005. This is in addition to the comments made by IDC, for example, that contact centers accounted for around 30% of the voice over Internet protocol systems sold worldwide in 2004.

At Corsidian, therefore, we have identified two trends in which we participate actively alongside our business partners, such as Concerto Software, which are based on:

• The design of the strategy, planning, and integration of multichannel platforms through traditional voice or voice over IP for the integration of a company's applications in order to offer timely response to client needs and answer these needs via remote channels.
  
  
• The design, integration, and operation of advanced voice recognition applications that enable the company to offer new services and products to the client.

Finally, the third driver of the development of contact centers is the challenge of attracting, retaining, and developing human talent in contact centers to maintain the main asset that makes it possible to offer timely and quality services to clients with the correct management of the innumerable situations that can occur in a contact center.

The two main challenges to the contact center are in this area. The first is around attracting and retaining human talent — an area where industry data are currently alarming. An example of this is the level of rotation in the industry worldwide, at 73% for agents and 78% among supervisors of management. The highest level of rotation is in outbound sales contact centers, at 187%, while at mixed centers (inbound/outbound) the level is 97%. Meanwhile, the lowest levels of rotation are at customer service centers, at 25%, and collection centers, at 33%.

The second challenge in this area is the development of talent in the contact centers, for which programs for quality control, productivity performance measurement, and feedback to agents will remain one of the major trends in the industry. For example, around 90% of contact centers use some type of manual call monitoring and only 20% use an automated quality control system, while Datamonitor predicts that quality control applications and e-learning will be the areas of greatest growth among traditional contact center applications, above other technologies, such as ACD, IVR, CTI, etc.

In order to face this market trend, Corsidian has formed a strategic alliance with Witness Systems to promote solutions for quality assurance/ control, integrated performance evaluation, and the development and delivery of personalized and dedicated training materials, to ensure the closure of the circle of the quality assurance/ control process.

At the same time, Corsidian has designed a product that is unique on the market in order to carry out benchmarking of the best profile for the particular requirements for an agent, and to be able to measure the selection process and later the process of managerial development — the abilities, motivation, behavior, and values that determine optimum competencies for the development of their activities and so increase the satisfaction of the employee, and therefore the customer, increasing the profitability of the operation and reducing the costs of recruiting, selection, hiring, and training of contact center agents.

With these three drivers, and with the answers from Corsidian to each of them, in addition to Corsidian's presence in Latin America, we expect to form a unique response to the favorable situation of the industry in our region where, according to Datamonitor, contact centers will grow 14% in 2005, compared with 4% growth in the United States, and lower only than the growth in Asia Pacific, which is estimated at 24%.

By:
Alejandro Suárez Bautista
General Manager, Corsidian Mexico & CA