Www.ir.com Contact Centers May 2013. IR Proprietary & Confidential I Use pursuant to your signed agreement or IR policy Providing Business Insight™

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Contact Centers

May 2013

IR Proprietary & Confidential I Use pursuant to your signed agreement or IR policyProviding Business Insight™

Market Overview

The U.S. industry has 3.07 million agent positions representing 5.219 million jobs, or about 3.7 percent of the employable U.S. population.

Large contact centers (with 250-plus agent positions) employ 34% of U.S. staff, despite accounting for less than 4% of physical contact Centre sites.

The retail and distribution sector has the most contact centers (~19%), with finance, manufacturing, outsourcing and telemarketing, telecoms and utilities are also important sectors.

Contact Centre Management

It is a central point in an enterprise from which all customer contacts are managed.


Contact centers are tasked with providing efficient and effective communications with, and services for, companies' external and/or internal customers and partners.

Infrastructure plays a critical role in delivering consistent and high-quality service and sales interactions across a variety of contact channels, to retain existing customers and attract new ones.

Contact Centre Management


Pain PointsCulturalCultural OperationalOperational

•Increased integrations between self- and assisted-services to adapt to evolving customer communications expectations and company strategies.

•Reduced or lack of infrastrucre visiablity.

•High level of expectations to lower costs while delivering more services.

•Increased departmental finger pointing.

•Lower moral with direct implac in retaining staff.

•Increased stress and work load which impacts the retention • of staff.

PoliticalPolitical•Difficulty in balancing business goals between growing the business or to simply stay in business.

•Executives have a increased challenge in maintaining costs, customer satisfaction, overall company stratigies.

StrategicStrategic•Unable to focus on infrastructure and operations that support customer retention strategies instead of gaining new customers.

•Difficultly in adapting to evolving customer expectations in terms of contact methods.

•Unable to provide a ROI on investments in a short term.

FinancialFinancial•Prioritize investments based on target customer segments and customer retention strageties.

•Focusing on their investments primarily on areas that will provide near-term and measurable return on investment.

•Increased SLA penelties

•Decrease operational and overall IT costs.

•Can't staff adequately to deliver level of service because of lack of revenues


Contact Centre Environment

BLOCKAGE

An accessibility measure, blockage — busy signals — indicates what percentage of customers will not be able to access the center at a given time due to insufficient network facilities in place. Most centers measure blockage by time of day or by occurrences of “all trunks busy” situations. Failure to include a blockage goal allows a centre to always meet its speed-of-answer goal simply by blocking the excess calls. As you can imagine, this damages customer accessibility and satisfaction, even though the contact centre appears to be doing a great job of managing the queue. The contact centre must also carefully determine the amount of bandwidth and e-mail server capacity to ensure that large quantities of e-mails do not overload the system. Likewise, the number of lines supporting fax services must be sufficient.

Metrics that effect overall operations



ABANDON RATE

Contact centers measure the number of abandons as well as the abandon rate, since both relate to retention and revenue. Keep in mind, however, that the abandon rate is not entirely under the contact centre's control. While abandons are affected by the average wait time in queue (which the contact centre can control), a multitude of other factors also influence this number, such as individual caller tolerance, time of day, availability of service alternatives, and so on.

Abandon rate is not typically a measure associated with e-mail communications, as e-mail does not abandon the “queue” once it has been sent, but it does apply to Web chat interactions.




SELF-SERVICE AVAILABILITY

More and more contacts are being offloaded from contact center agents to self-service alternatives. In the contact centre, self-service usage is an important gauge of accessibility and is typically measured as an overall number, by self-service methodology and menu points, and by time of day or demographic group. In cases of Web chat, automated alternatives such as FAQs or use of help functions can reduce the requirement for the live interaction with a Web chat agent.




LONGEST DELAY IN QUEUE

Another speed-of-answer measure is how long the oldest call in queue has been waiting: the longest delay in queue (LDQ). A number of centers use real-time LDQ to indicate when more staff need to be made immediately available.

Historical LDQ is a more common measure, to indicate the “worst case” experience of a customer over a period of time. Historical LDQ is measured in two categories. One is the longest delay for a customer whose transaction was finally handled by an agent (longest delay to answer), and the other is the longest delay for a customer who finally abandoned the contact (longest delay to abandon), as might be the case in a Web chat scenario.




SYSTEM AVAILABILITY

Slow response time from the computer system can add seconds or minutes to the handle time of a transaction. In the call center, system speed, uptime, and overall availability should be measured on an ongoing basis to ensure maximum response time and efficiency as well as service to callers. For example, if the interactive voice response (IVR) typically handles 50% of calls to completion but is out of service, more calls will require agent assistance than normal, causing overtime costs, long delays, and generally poor service. Often this will be a measure of performance that resides in the IT department, but it is also a crucial measure of contact center performance.



High definition monitoring


* Source: The US Contact Centre Decision Makers Guide 3rd Edition 2009-210 by ContactBable

Use of multiple applications across vertical marketsMany of today’s contact centers use complicated, multiple applications, often only loosely-linked applications and systems.

FinanceCustomer accounts, CRM, product database, payment systems, email, quotation system (esp. insurance), complaints, other sister companies’ systems (often through merger and acquisition), legal and compliance scripts, insurance claims.

Outsourcing Multiple screens and applications depending on customer requirements.

Retail & Distribution

Supply chain systems, distribution and shipping history, warehouse stock systems, CRM, customer history, pricing applications, payment systems, complaints, email.

TelecomsCustomer accounts, cross-selling/up-selling applications, CRM, field maintenance booking systems, real-time network status screens, complaints, payment history, credit/debit card applications, fulfillment systems, email.

UtilitiesCustomer accounts, payment systems, utilities status systems (e.g. scheduled or emergency work being done on water, gas, electricity supplies), cross-selling/ up-selling prompts, product information, maintenance and booking systems, complaints, email.


PSTNSBC

QA

Data Path

Dialer

Call Centers Environment

GW

Voice Path

PBX

ACDIVR

WS

CTI

DB

CRMChat

Web

eMail WFM

Rpt

WH

AD

MoM


Value Drivers & ROI

Small Medium Large Average% of respondentsrating as 'strongly

agree'

Reduce telecoms costs between locations 4.3 3.9 4.6 4.3 52%

Greater flexibility in adding and changingagents 3.8 4.5 4.3 4.2 46%

Reduced network and IT costs 3.7 3.9 4.7 4.1 41%

Easier integration of applications 3.5 3.5 4.3 3.7 25%

Support multimedia environment 3.4 3.6 3.6 3.5 29%

Greater choice in choosing vendors andapplications 3.1 3.3 4.2 3.5 23%

NB: scores relate to the 5-point scale of 'Strongly Disagree - 1, to Strongly Agree - 5‘


How has implementing VoIP improved contact centers? (by contact centre size)


High definition monitoring


Vertical market Touchtone IVR Speech recognition

Healthcare 100% 50%

Insurance 100% 100%

Public Service 100% 25%

Retail & Distribution 88% 0%

Finance 88% 38%

Transport & Travel 67% 0%

Outsourcing 64% 14%

Services 56% 33%

Manufacturing 50% 25%


How has implementing IVRs improved contact centers? (by contact centre size)The use of IVR, whether touchtone or speech recognition, is embedded deep in the fabric of the contact centre industry, with the majority of operations using touchtone to route calls, and almost one-quarter using speech to direct enquiries.

Documents

Www.ir.com Contact Centers May 2013. IR Proprietary & Confidential I Use pursuant to your signed agreement or IR policy Providing Business Insight™