New Contact Center Industry Research Shows Focus on Customer Loyalty and Revenue; Organizations Need More Customer Data and Insight

SALT LAKE CITY, July 17, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- A recent study, conducted by ICMI and sponsored by inContact (NASDAQ: SAAS) surveyed more than 500 contact center professionals and revealed new insights into short- and long-term goals and investment trends, including increasing complexity, agent management attrition and a growing need for customer data.  The survey addressed contact center professionals working in centers—both large and small—around the world, including respondents from more than 20 countries.

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"A few short years ago during the economic downturn, contact centers were laser-focused on driving down costs and riding out the storm.  Today, as this new study illustrates, the customer service macro trends– social, mobile and self-service – are driving contact centers to transform their operations to be more customer centric and responsive," said Mariann McDonagh, Chief Marketing Officer at inContact. "These findings clearly demonstrate that, over the next five years, contact center leaders will make informed technology decisions that help them achieve these demanding requirements."

Nearly 70 percent of respondents identified "meeting service level agreements" as a measure of success in a contact center today. More than 40 percent of contact centers indicated they are experiencing agent attrition, and one quarter (25.3 percent) indicated that they were experiencing customer attrition. One major challenge identified in the survey, with 69.8 percent of contact centers, was increased complexity, due to the proliferation of new channels and increasingly multi-channel customers. Less than half of those respondents (32.7 percent), however, had upgraded their contact centers to deal with channel proliferation.

Key findings regarding priorities identified were measure on a scale of 1 to 5:

• Customer satisfaction was identified as the most important priority, earning an average rating of 3.86 out of 5 in the survey.
• Increasing agent productivity and meeting service level agreements both placed at 3.56/5.
• Increased sales and profitability scored 3.35/5.
• Lower operating costs scored 3.3/5.

"We are excited by the findings of this survey and the opportunities these results offer to inContact and the cloud contact center industry," said McDonagh.  "Our award-winning cloud portfolio is perfectly positioned to help contact centers address all the issues on their high priority list – customer loyalty and satisfaction, agent performance and retention and, most importantly, how to increase profitability through every service experience."

ICMI authored a whitepaper, "Leveraging Complexity: Trends and Strategies for Future Success in the Contact Center," that further outlines the findings of the survey, which can be downloaded here.

About inContact

inContact (NASDAQ: SAAS) helps contact centers around the globe create profitable customer experiences through its powerful portfolio of cloud-based contact center software solutions. The company's services and solutions enable contact centers to operate more efficiently, optimize the cost and quality of every customer interaction, create new pathways to profit and ensure ongoing customer-centric business improvement and growth. To learn more, visit www.inContact.com.

SOURCE inContact

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