Steve Morrell, founder and principal analyst at ContactBabel said, “Underlining the ongoing growth of voiceless interaction, this year’s research shows an ongoing decline in the proportion of talk time, with agents now spending just 52% of their time on calls. We are also seeing a corresponding rise in the time spent doing multimedia handling from 5% in 2011 to 8% this year.”
“At the same time, first call resolution rates are down again this year,” continued Morrell, “but counter-intuitively we see this as possibly being a positive development. Contact centre customers are increasingly resolving their simpler, more straightforward queries via web or self-service portals, leaving only the more complex queries to be handled via the voice channel. While these issues inevitably take a little longer to resolve, the trend also highlights that the market is maturing as it continues to shift to voiceless interaction.”
Enghouse Interactive, Platinum sponsor of the research, has solutions across the contact centre environment. Together, these support the full range of deployment methods from premise-based through to private, public or community cloud requirements.
“Once again this year, “The UK Contact Centre Decision-Makers’ Guide” has demonstrated its continuing status as the most comprehensive study of all aspects of the UK contact centre industry and its role as a chronicler of the fast maturing contact centre space,” says Jeremy Payne, international group marketing director, Enghouse Interactive. “We are focused on supporting the contact centre industry and as a technology provider we see the insight that the guide provides into the views and opinions of users of contact centre solutions from multi-channel workforce management to self-service, niche channels and cloud solutions as invaluable.
“Every day in engaging with the contact centre marketplace, we are seeing the same trends towards voiceless interaction that the report identifies and we are focused on developing solutions to help organisations support change in customer expectations,” Payne continues.
Interested parties can download a copy of the “The UK Contact Centre Decision-Makers’ Guide” (2012 – 10th Edition) from the Enghouse Interactive website. Click here to download the report.