Now, more than ever, organisations need to cope with a business situation that is characterized by rapid change. Higher customer expectations, increased mobility and new customer management technologies are primary drivers here and a main consequence is a reversal of traditional roles whereby the customer is now in the driving seat as far as interaction with the company is concerned. As a result many company board members are urgently trying to understand and quantify the bottom line effects of a more strategic approach to customer service; the contact centre is front and centre in their thinking as to how to best respond here.

Source : Dimension Data's 2012 Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report

Contact Centre managers are being thrust into the spotlight and need to come through with RoI-driven answers to challenges such as

	The rapid expansion of customer contact channels to cope with new modes of communication, eg. social media The necessary evolution of systems and processes to cope with empowered and mobile customers using cross-channel communications.
	The building of customer-friendly, self-service systems to handle the “simpler” transactions.
	The development of skilled and empowered agents to handle the more complex types of interactions

Source : Dimension Data's 2012 Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report

Dangers Of A “Cost Centre” Mindset

Extensive fieldwork and data analysis (e.g. annual Awards submissions) confirm that many regional call centres are driven by a “cost centre” mindset. This is perfectly acceptable if that is the organisation’s branding position but so often a company is giving out one marketing message but failing to deliver an equivalent customer experience. In the contact centre this “disconnect” appears as a tendency to “make the numbers look good” at the expense of not reflecting the reality of what is truly going on with customers. In some cases, this even involves deliberate “massaging” of certain KPIs because misguided targets actually encourage such behavior. Unfortunately, the main consequences are that the foundations for progress to a higher level of maturity are not being established, and future growth becomes more difficult.

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