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Information Overload Paralyses UK Contact Centres
05 Jun 2006
Managers drowning in more than 2 million reports per day
Managers in the UK’s 5,000 contact centres are facing information overload, forced to wade through more than 2.3 million reports every day – an average of 450 per contact centre. According to research from communications software provider Exony over 854 million reports are generated annually, containing more than 10 billion lines of information. These range from operational reports on call handling to management level information detailing overall contact centre performance.
The figures, based on industry research and Exony’s own calculations, demonstrate that more and more management time is being consumed by unnecessary and unfocused reporting. This drastically impacts the ability of organisations to focus on key operational issues, to deliver improved customer service and to align contact centres fully with the core business.
Exony’s methodology was based on the following research:
•The UK has 5,200 contact centres employing 850,000 people1
•The average contact centre has at least 10 operational IT systems covering areas such as call routing, workforce management, voice recording, agent performance, desktop integration and back end systems2
•Each of the annual one billion calls to UK contact centres3 feeds data into these systems
•Every system provides at least 15 reports per cycle (with some surveyed producing up to 150), three times per day4
•These therefore generate 2.3 million reports per day making an annual total of 854 million reports, containing over 10 billion lines of data.
“Effective and targeted reporting is obviously critical to efficient contact centre performance, but these figures show that the pendulum has swung too far the other way,” commented Ian Ashby, CEO, Exony. “Contact centre managers are being swamped by too much information, bogging them down in detail rather than allowing them to deliver against business goals. Organisations need to rationalise reporting, focusing on getting the right information and key metrics out of their systems and made available to the right people quickly – otherwise managers find themselves trying to find a needle in an information haystack.”
Measuring performance has always been central to contact centre operation, with first generation systems producing simple metrics on call volumes, agent utilisation, staff absenteeism, cost per hour and speed to answer calls.
However, the growing complexity and number of contact centre systems has caused an explosion in the amount and frequency of reporting. Organisations now need to report on contact centre performance across their entire business, taking into account factors such as outsourcing, offshoring, multiple site ‘virtual’ contact centres and the need to handle multiple brands using the same core infrastructure, according to Ashby. These reports need to be available securely to users at all levels, tailored to what is relevant to their role without overburdening busy managers with unnecessary detail.
“Contact centres are now at the heart of most organisations, making them central to their business performance,” concluded Ashby. “It is time that reporting evolved to meet this need, providing the ability to deliver management information that matters, in real-time.”
1 Source: ContactBabel, quoted at http://services.silicon.com/offshoring/0,3800004877,39156435,00.htm
2 Typical contact centre systems include ACD/ICM, voice recording, QPM (agent performance),workforce management, dialler, multimedia, service orientated applications, ERP and CRM and accounting (Source: Exony Survey of UK Contact Centres, May 2006)
3 Source: BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/bob/callcentres/
4 Source: Exony Survey of
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