Published on the 11/02/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
Four out of five Australians and New Zealanders still prefer to pick up the phone when they need to contact an organisation; it’s driving strong growth of contact centre solutions through to 2019…
While there has been a steady increase in the self-service options available over the internet 80 percent of Australians and New Zealanders still prefer to speak to someone when interacting with an organisation according to analyst Fifth Quadrant. It’s a persistent trend which is keeping the call centre solutions sector relatively buoyant.
Demand for contact centre software applications is tipped by analyst Frost & Sullivan to grow at 6.2 percent a year until 2019 while cloud-based contact centre solutions will surge by 38.9 percent a year over the same period, although admittedly off a fairly small base.
Frost & Sullivan’s recently released Australian Contact Centre Market Report 2013 notes that on-premise solutions are still favoured by 60 percent of contact centres, with just over 10 percent using a cloud-based solution. However its survey of 227 people in the industry revealed that three out of five intended to evaluate or deploy cloud based solutions in the coming two years.
While this points to solid prospects for cloud vendors, they need to be aware that there is a clear preference for locally hosted solutions as potential users cite lingering concerns about reliability, security and availability of cloud solutions. The report states that cloud vendors without local data centres would find themselves, “severely challenged to secure customer wins and generate growth”.
In terms of the software applications being sought by contact centres, the greatest demand is for systems targeted at performance optimisation, quality management, and multimedia. The report also noted the rise of solutions focused on improving customer experience through harnessing analytics, from vendors such as (24)7, which applies predictive analytics to support contact centre operators.
The importance of a good customer experience has been highlighted in another recently released study – the Fifth Quadrant Contact Centre Key Performance Metrics Report for Australia and New Zealand. In her most recent blog post Fifth Quadrant CEO Dr Catriona Wallace notes that almost three quarters of Australians said that a poor contact centre experience could be enough to prompt them to switch allegiance to an alternative company.
Those companies which had a “mature customer experience strategy” reported as much as a 20 percent improvement in key performance indicators which could include completion rates or time to resolution, which could help guard against customer churn.
