Contact centres moving from customer service to engagement

Companies are moving towards customer engagement from customer service and new technologies around cloud and social are becoming more critical for customer care delivery, says Frost & Sullivan

Andrew Milroy, Vice President, Asia Pacific ICT Research at Frost & Sullivan said that it is critical for companies to understand customer's behaviour to drive revenue growth, build experience & improve operations and margins.

He added that on-demand contact centre technology is expected to drive cost optimisation and increase access to larger labour pools.
"Analytics plays a key role in enabling Enterprises to deliver differentiated experience, and create a winning strategy," he said, adding that strategic contact centres report on customer-centric insights, not on operational metrics.

Mr. Milroy added that new business models are emerging. "On demand business models, self service and co-creation are having major impact on customer care," he told delegates attending the 2011 Frost & Sullivan Customer Interaction Hong Kong Summit.
He also said that organisations can use internet and social networks to extend span of influence and analytics can be used to make decisions based on this influence.

Mr. Milroy said there is strong interest from Enterprises to use social media for customer care or customer engagement, adding that the telecoms, hospitality and banking industry are already experimenting with social media.

"However, there are no real standard yet, only 3-7 people teams that are using publicly available social media monitoring tools," he noted. He added that there is a need to integrate social media as one of the channels in the contact centre. "Creating processes on how to screen and respond on social media is critical," he said.

Mr. Milroy noted that there are close to 100,000 contact centre seats on a hosted platform in Asia Pacific. He added that contact centre in the cloud is gaining strong interest, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 20% in the next five years.

"Flexibility, scalability, peak demand, cost and remote agents are key drivers for contact centre in the cloud," he added, noting that more than 30 service providers offering hosted contact center services in Asia Pacific.

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