Welcome to Fifth Quadrant and callcentres.net's first news issue for 2012. We are pleased to be back and be bringing you our regular contact centre and service sector news reports, Analyst updates and blogs.

I will start the year by sharing new insights from our Australian and New Zealand contact centre industry market reports.

For Australia…

The Australian contact centre industry has grown 7.6% since late 2010 to be about 214,300 seats. The industry is expected to continue growing at 4.1% (predicted 223,100 seats by end 2012).

48% of contact centres are using hosted solutions and there is an increase from 7 to 13% of centres using cloud based technology.

The top challenges facing the contact centre industry in Australia over the next 12 months include:

1. Inadequate headcount to effectively meet business requirements
2. Need to upgrade existing technology
3. Change management
4. Training/ Agent development
5. Budgetary constraints/ Expectation to do more with less

Now to NZ…

The contact centre industry in New Zealand is about 29,610 seats which is a 1% decline from 2010. This is exactly the growth rate (albeit negative) that the industry predicted it would achieve when researched in 2010. The industry predicts stronger growth over the next 12 months with a projected seat size of 31,500 by end of 2012.

The agent turnover rate is 24% p.a. down from 27% in 2010.

About 4 in 10 centres currently use hosted solutions and about 1 in 3 are using or about to use some type of cloud based application in their centre.

The top challenges facing the contact centre industry in NZ over the next 12 months include:

1. Inadequate headcount to effectively meet business requirements
2. Change management
3. Improving productivity/efficiency
4. Training/ Agent development
5. Better utilisation of current technology

Wishing you a prosperous Water Dragon inspired 2012.

This Thursday callcentres.net will go through a beautiful transformation and re-emerge on 1 July as Fifth Quadrant Pty Ltd. Let me tell you a few things about Fifth Quadrant:

Fifth Quadrant will position as a Service Strategy and Research Consultancy (including a training division) focusing on voice, face-to-face, online, correspondence and social media service channels.

We will retain the name callcentres.net is for our online publishing and social media division.

Our purpose will be to change the way organisations think about Service Strategy and to ensure it has on-going presence at the Boardroom table.

To us, Service Strategy is the specific strategic plan dedicated to providing direction, scope and the configuration of resources for the delivery of customer service through multiple channels. Service Strategy must directly support an organisation's corporate strategic goals. The best Service Strategies are Board-driven, enterprise-wide, customer-centric, multi-channel and are directly linked to organisational performance, revenue and profit.

We also believe that great service has a tangible effect on a person's day and life and that the act of serving someone is one of the most powerful 'goods' an organisation can do.

From working with organisations over the last 15 years, we know that Board and C-level Executives typically focus on four strategies: Finance; Marketing & Sales; IT/Operations; and Human Resources.

We believe it is long overdue that a fifth strategy (hence our name), Service Strategy, sits rightfully alongside and integrates with these other four strategies.

And we are no longer just experts in contact centre, we now also provide research and consulting across the 5 major channel categories:

1. Voice
2. Face-to-Face
3. Online
4. Correspondence and
5. Social media

Cool huh.

Now for a few interesting stats related to what Australian and NZ consumers think about using channels or technology such as virtual hold, real time video and smart phone applications (source: callcentres.net Avaya Consumer Index 2011). Results are:

Percentage of consumers happy to use:

Virtual hold - Aust 75% | NZ 71%

Real time video - Aust 40% | NZ 43%

Smart Phone application - Aust 39% | NZ 33%

Speaking of smart phones, on the weekend I managed to drop my smartphone in the dunny. Gross. Try not to visualise.

I grabbed it out and immediately yelled to the other people who live in my house, including a number of teenagers, WHAT DO I DO? And here are the responses:

• Stick the wet phone in a bowl of rice
• Stick the wet phone in the oven
• Hair dry the wet phone
• Wrap the wet phone tightly in newspaper then sit on it
• Drop the wet phone into mentholated spirits then let it dry out
• Put the wet phone in the sun for a day
• Stick the wet phone in the back pocket of tight jeans and don't take it out for a day
• Stick the phone in your bra and don't take it out for a day

So, which of these worked?

For a whole day I tried most these remedies and the only winner was the hair dryer. Woohoo.

Smart Phone? Would be a lot smarter if you could take the bloody back off the phone and shake the water out.