Next week we will be launching the 2011 Contact Centre Industry Benchmarking survey (Aust and NZ) and I would love you all to be involved, so please look out for it hitting your inbox.

In preparation for learning about all that is contact centre 2011-2012, I thought it might be good to revisit the year that was 2010 -2011.

Key stuff included:

For 2010-2011 the Australian Contact Centre industry’s key strategic goals included:

1. Improving customer service
2. Upgrading technology
3. Instituting a cultural change in the contact centre.

Specifically for customer experience Australian contact centres focussed on:

1. Improving agent training and coaching
2. Quality monitoring 
3. Providing an overall better level of customer experience.

With regard to revenue generation in the contact centre industry we saw organisations attempt to 

1. Increase up selling and cross selling skills
2. Improve agent training and education around products 
3. Grow their client base.

Key HR strategies centred on:

1. Providing agent training
2. Improving agent engagement
3. Recruiting quality candidates.

Key IT strategies included 

1. The implementation of new technology
2. Upgrading technology
3. Reviewing future IT requirements.

Strategies for performance management in Australian contact centres included 

1. Investment in agent training and development around KPIs, 
2. Reviewing KPIs and targets and 
3. Focusing on obtaining consistency in agent performance against KPIs.

What do these strategies tell us about the Australian Contact Centre industry? These results strongly suggest the industry has had a renewed focus on the customer experience as the primary driver of growth and profitability. This planned focus was to be enabled by considerable investment in recruiting the right people and training them on product and performance. This people focus was to be supplemented by strong investment in IT enablement of the contact centre with investment in customer related technologies: CRM; efficiency related technology: Workforce planning and quality related technology: call recording.

The key themes we Analysts talked about in the industry included the coming of the multi-channel contact centre, the rise of social media in customer interactions and the importance of workforce optimisation.

But has all this happened as planned by the industry? Stay tuned and we will let you know very soon.

If you are dead keen, Aussies and Kiwis, to participate in the 2011 Contact Centre Industry Market Report study please let Susan know at skealy@fifthquadrant.com.au 

Other important facts to note for the 2010-2011 year has been the dominance of nudes and camels.

These are colours, not some weird animal cult. This is the fashion section of the blog. For the coming season there will be return to Liberace inspired extremely bright orange, coral, greens and purples. Be sure to wear these colours together in your service centre. It may encourage agents to finish their work more efficiently so they can stop looking at you. Again please note that our Fifth Quadrant fashion advice is really a service we provide for middle aged men, not the cool ladies or the immaculately dressed gay community….;)

I love New Zealanders. 

But not their sheep placenta face cream.

Each year I am invited to speak at the Contact Centre Institute of New Zealand's annual conference which was held in Auckland just over a week ago.

The CCiNZ has been established for about 3 years. The creation of CCiNZ resulted from the lack of effectiveness the broader industry association, TUANZ (Telecommunication Users Association of New Zealand) had in the contact centre industry. From my perspective, having struggled to deal with TUANZ over many years, the CCiNZ has been an amazing breath of fresh air for the NZ industry. 

Here is how a typical conversation with TUANZ under its previous leadership would go...

Me: "Hi TUANZ. We have a survey we would like you to let your members know about and then they can get a free $1500 survey just for being part of it. Can you please assist?"

TUANZ: "No"

Me: "Just one email broadcast to your subscribers?"

TUANZ: "No."

Me: "Seriously, we are about the only place they can get industry information from. Can you reconsider?”

TUANZ: "We said No."

Me: "Ok, how about you let your audience know they can come to a free breakfast seminar and I will educate them about the state of the NZ industry. For free. Surely?"

TUANZ: "No."

Me: "How about you come and do an opening speech at the event even though you are not helping us promote it?”

TUANZ: "Yes"

Me: "Ok we will confirm the day before."

Me: Confirmed the day before

TUANZ: Did not come to event

Me: After the event: "Um, were you involved in a nasty car accident or something terrible that meant that you couldn’t make it to the event to do the opening speech and not let us know?"

TUANZ: "No, we forgot to come"

Brilliant.

Anyway, that story was shared as a result of TUANZ now planning to re-enter the contact centre industry, but under new leadership of Paul Brislen who seems very nice and keen to re-establish relationships with our industry.

We however will stay firmly in support of CCiNZ who we think do an amazing job. The strong leaders of CCiNZ, Katherine, Nadine, Kaye, Angela, and many others do an outstanding job. For more info on CCiNZ and how you can be part of it please go to www.ccinz.org.nz

We are about launch our Australian and NZ contact centre industry benchmarking programme, so please let Susan know if you are keen to participate skealy@fifthquadrant.com.au

Here are some early stats we have on the NZ contact centre market and also the Aussie market...

New Zealand

Seat growth  2010-2011 4.9% 

Seats 29,580

Predicted growth 2011-2012 2.3% 

Seats 30,260 

Australia

Seat growth 2010-2011 6.2% 

Seats 211,460 

Predicted growth 2011-2012 4.1% 

Seats 220,200

Gold.

OK, so I bought some face cream from Auckland airport, just because it said, "Made with Sheep's Placenta"
Seriously, what was I thinking?

Seriously, Kiwis what are you thinking?

Only because, alongside the Canadians, Kiwis are the nicest people in the world, do I forgive you for making me spread afterbirth on my face...;) C x

Last week in San Francisco was salesforce.com's (sfdc) annual global event, Dreamforce. Metallica was the headline act (please note APAC conference organisers, Metalica is not a tired 1980s cover band). 
Fifth Quadrant sent our Head of Research, Chris Kirby, to check it out and report back the key discussions which included...

Dreamforce had about 45,000 people in attendance. 

sfdc have moved their rhetoric from Software as a Service (SaaS) to Platform as a Service (PaaS) as they focus on Cloud computing enabling the future of application development and distribution.

sfdc discussed their three key platforms: 1)force.com; 2)  database.com and 3) new acquisition, Heroku.

The primary focus of the event centred on discussing Marc Benioff’s concept of the 'Social Enterprise'.  

The thrust here is around enterprises acting more like consumers than like traditional organisations. That is, consumers are highly social in terms of using social networks and using mobile devices so why aren’t enterprises reflecting this same behaviour in-house. The cloud is enabler of this works as it is a more flexible and faster tool to respond to changing needs of the enterprise. A simple example sfdc used was that employees outside (and inside) of work are highly skilled in using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and mobile devices for consumer based activities, yet when they are in work they are forced to use out dated legacy systems that don't work in the same way as say Facebook and are not intuitive. Therefore the Social Enterprise is about enterprises working and using the same IT tools that are now becoming widely used by consumers.

sfdc used the Toyota Friend site as a reference site as a successful social enterprise.
Cool.

This week, although not having quite 45,000 at our event, we launched the 2011 Workforce Optimisation Market Report. We have fielded this study in Australia, NZ, Singapore, Philippines, Malaysia, India as well as Canada and the US.

Fifth Quadrant’s definition of WFO is:

Workforce Optimisation is an organisational strategy focused on gathering and using data and information to optimise the performance of management, employees, processes, systems and customer experience. WFO solutions incorporate workforce management, quality monitoring/full-time recording, e-Learning, performance management, speech and data analytics and customer feedback.

Some key results for the Australian industry included:

43% of contact centres have performance management software
74% have e-learning solutions
47% have quality monitoring voice and data capture
16% have speech and data analytics
74% have workforce management software

At both the Sydney and Melbourne events, we had with us the delightful Mr Bill Durr who is Verint’s Global Principal Solutions Consultant. We talked with our audiences about the Australian market results vs the US results (Bill lives in Texas, but refuses to be called a Texan) and one of the key differences in the US market compared to Australia is the lower adoption of speech analytics here.

Another crackingly interesting stat is.....the percentage of Australian organisations using formal forecasting for multiple channels:

Inbound calls 37%
Outbound calls 23%
Email 10%
Web chat 20%
Text/SMS 40%
Back office      6%

If you would like more information on the Australia and New Zealand WFO Market Report which is available for ordering now (or the Asian Report or the North American report) please contact Julie-Anne Hazlett at jhazlett@fifthquadrant.com.au.

If you would like more information on the merits of toeless stockings and how great they are, please also contact Julie-Anne.