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Dimension Data has announced today that organizations in the $130 billion global contact center industry are not fully leveraging Customer Relationship Management (CRM) initiatives. Instead, contact centers are focusing on improving operational efficiencies, reducing costs and improving services.
Such findings are a part of the 2008 Dimension Data Contact Center Benchmarking Report, which includes survey responses from 300 contact centers in 36 countries across five continents.
"Minimal progress has been made in adopting a more customer-oriented, CRM- based approach within the contact center over the last 10 years since the Benchmarking Report was initiated," said Alex George, Dimension Data spokesperson for the Benchmarking Report, in a Wednesday statement.
"When we compared this year's findings with those from our inaugural report, the picture is not positive."
A key benefit to CRM is the establishment of a single view of the customer. Just ten years ago, 39 percent of participating contact centers already possessed this capability, with another 45 percent planning to implement a single view within two years. The results for this year indicate a decline as only 34 percent of centers possess a single customer view.
The study also found that ten years ago, many organizations said that they intended to deploy a more sophisticated set of customer metrics within their contact centers, including ways to gauge customer lifetime value and profitability.
This year’s study revealed that only a small fraction of contact centers are able to measure or actively employ these types of metrics. For instance, less than 10 percent of centers surveyed have the capability to measure lifetime value and only 18 percent of centers use customer profitability as a metric.
CRM applications also provide the benefit of ‘trigger events’ within inbound customer service contact centers. These events can involve initiating calls to customers as a result of the nature or outcome of their previous inbound calls.
These trigger events usually address customer dissatisfaction, retention of a customer or a revenue generation matter. This year’s report found that only 21 percent of contact centers actively engage in this type of customer management activity.
"These findings indicate that the development of a more holistic and sophisticated approach to customer management is less of a priority today than it was 10 years ago, and there is a back-to-basics trend with contact centers focusing more on basic performance efficiencies and cost reduction," George said.
"This is also reflected in the commercial drivers of contact centers. Only 16% of participating centers ranked 'creating direct customer relationships' among their top three commercial drivers, compared with over 50% 10 years ago. This underscores that there has been a major shift away from the tenets of CRM over the last decade."
What is interesting about this report is discovering why there has been a shift away from CRM within the contact center over the past three years. It is possible that many of the CRM packages available do not deliver as promised and therefore contact centers have either moved away or at least shied away from the technology.
This is also an area where proper methodologies must be in place before a CRM solution should be selected. If the contact center does not properly identify its needs, the available solutions and how they apply within the center and the organization, the value cannot be derived from the solution and it will not be used.
Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMC (News - Alert) and has also written for eastbiz.com. To see more of her articles, please visit Susan J. Campbell’s columnist page.
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