Contact centre survey reveals key trends in managing new campaigns

- 62% of contact centre campaigns are set up in under 3 weeks
- Phone remains most popular communications channel
- 85% say campaign development software makes it ‘easier’ to launch new projects or services

Infinity CCS, a global provider of contact centre technology solutions has today announced the results of its 2012 Contact Centre Campaign Survey designed to reveal how effective contact centres are in setting up new customer campaigns or services.

The key findings of the research were:

• 62% of contact centre campaigns/projects are set up in under 3 weeks
• Most popular type of campaign being run was ‘Customer Service’ (63.3%), followed by ‘Telemarketing/Sales’ (36.7%)
• Phone is still the most frequently used communication channel for both ‘inbound’ and outbound’ contact (used in over 70% of both inbound and outbound projects). Other channels included email, web contact forms, post and social media.
• When specialist campaign development software was used, 84% of organisations said that they found it ‘easier’ to launch campaigns, while 57% said it was quicker to launch campaigns
• 85% of campaigns/projects involve agents using a formal or informal script - with IT personnel, in-house software developers and/or external software developers involved in the IT implementation of these scripts in 63% of cases.
• 43% of organisations use specialist project development software for developing agent desktops, scripting, designing reports etc.

• Managers and Supervisors receive historical campaign reports on ‘call handling times’ in 70% of cases, ‘agent wrap times’ in 65%, and ‘callers in queue’ in 58%. The probability that Agents receive these metrics is 55.9%, 44.1% and 35.3% respectively.

• Cloud v. on-site technology – On-site technology is still preferable with 78% of Call Recording/Quality Management applications, 66.7% of ACD/Call Handling systems and 53.8% of Performance Management technology respectively.

However cloud-based apps were used for ACD/Call Handling (25.6%), ‘Data/Speech Analytics’ (23%), Call Recording/Quality Management (17.9%) and Dialler technology (15.4%).

“Our 2012 survey provides a rare insight into how organisations set up, manage and report on their contact centre campaigns” says Carl Adkins, CEO, Infinity CCS. “It reveals just how fast contact centres have to launch new campaigns as well as the breadth of modern contact centre campaigns – from single channel inbound or outbound campaigns with limited reporting, right through to complex multichannel inbound/outbound campaigns that use campaign development software and deliver sophisticated real time and historic contact reports. The research also demonstrates the value of project/campaign development software in enabling organisations to launch campaigns easier and faster.”

“The uptake of cloud-based applications is also more conservative than might be imagined, showing that the majority of contact centre operations are still relying on premise-based technology especially for the likes of call recording, quality management and ACD/call handling. We expect cloud market share to increase as legacy investments reach end of life and cloud vendors prove themselves to wary contact centres.”

“We would like to sincerely thank all the organisations who took the time to participate in this year’s Contact Centre Campaign Survey.”

The survey, designed and conducted by Infinity in conjunction with marketing consultancy, Gray Associates was conducted online; and promoted via leading industry web sites callcentrehelper.com and callcentre.co.uk as well as via digital marketing.

A total of 62 organisations took part in the survey. For each survey completed, Infinity donated £10 to The British Red Cross (www.RedCross.org.UK/donate)

For further information or to view the complete research report: http://www.infinityccs.com/campaign-survey-results