During the past three years, the percentage of contact-center decision makers who are planning to consider contact-center professional services has risen from 7.9 percent to 21 percent. Keeping pace with this trend, the percentage of contact-center decision makers who are planning to consider managed and/or hosted contact-center solutions has risen from 8.4 percent to 20.1 percent.
Potentially more notable is the rise in weighting importance that enterprises are putting on a vendor’s services capability in their solution and vendor selection process. In 2004, 18 percent of contact-center decision makers indicated vendor services would «highly influence» their solution purchases and this «influence» grew to 28.2 percent in early 2007. (Editor’s note: All statistics cited were developed in the «InfoTrack for Enterprise Services Program,» a research program of the Telecom Intelligence Group, between 2004 and 2007.) The key questions that arise from this research are: what is driving these changes? and which professional services are in the highest demand and why?
No one will argue that a company’s contact center is not a mission-critical application, regardless of whether it serves customers or company employees. Obviously, the contact center serving customers has a direct relationship to profitable revenues and customer satisfaction, but employee satisfaction, as it is manifested in customer relationships, can be of equally critical stature. Today’s contact-center technology incorporates new and improved capabilities that can be used to vastly improve business processes and customer relationships. These technologies, including SIP, VoIP, speech recognition and improved applications have combined to produce a powerful business tool — a tool that can significantly alter a company’s success in its marketplace, but also a tool that represents virtually limitless possibilities that are accompanied by geometrically increasing technical complexity.
The demand for professional contact-center services is broad, encompassing not only the contact center but also IVR functionality and customer-relationship management (CRM). The most in-demand service is contact-center design and consulting services, with 29.5 percent of the available market anticipating the adoption of this service within the next three years. Contact-center CRM design and consulting services, with 26.8 percent of the market anticipating adoption of such a service within the next three years, and IVR design and consulting services, with 25.2 percent of the market anticipating adoption within the next three years, round out the top three contact-center services in demand.
Fuente: TelecomWeb
