"As the economy starts picking up so will employment opportunities, and thus there will be an increase in attrition rates, which has always been a contact center industry challenge. High attrition leads to low customer satisfaction, since a good portion of your agents will not be experienced. I think Contact Center Directors and Human Resources Directors need to start putting value in experience, which will require a major mindset shift."

"Communication! Concentrate on taking action in the future and not what happened in the past! Stick to dead-lines! And HR- should concentrate on quality not quantity!"

• Deployment of best practice processes
• Next emerging market sourcing locations
• Deployment of UC infrastructures
• Recruiting to support training for excellence

"Resisting the pressure on wholesale operating cuts. Improving the customer experience and thereby motivating staff and improving employee engagement to increase efficiency and revenue."

• Contact Center Directors: To meet the challenges of modern contact centers, we need to provide management and operational users with a monitoring tool that provides real time, actionable information. Online monitoring of business performance indicators enables instant identification of issues and business trends.
• Company Executives: Align the contact center goals with the company goals.
• IT Directors: Their priority is to guarantee consistency between real-time analysis and the historical reporting. To implement a contact center monitoring tool that: Support Operations Decisions, Enable Customer Defined Key Performance Indicators and Align Campaign, Service, and Corporate GOALS.
• Human Resources: Make people more autonomous. Reward based on performance.

a) Quality
b) Reduce Cost
c) Reduce Cost
d) Quality

"In each case it will be to convince their boards that UK based voice contact is a necessary part of delivering quality customer service"

"The top priorities are assessing the size and scope of social activity and staffing it accordingly with the right personnel, but more importantly the right objectives. This is less about "joining the conversation" and more about solving issues while steering perception."

"A) And B). We must focus on simplifying the process. D) The goal of Human Resource directors must be to have a plan to make agents and supervisor behave more professional."

a) Contact Center Directors: will focus on increasing call quality and improving the representative productivity
b) Company Executives: will be seeking ways to increase the rate of leads converted into revenue and improving sales productivity and customer satisfaction
c) IT Directors: will focus on improving reliability and call quality and integrating voice applications with existing business applications without increasing complexity or operating costs.

a) Directors will seek to empower customers to address their own needs.
b) Executives will aim to achieve a 360 degree view of their customers, in order to add value.
c) IT Directors will evaluate business process engines in a bid to streamline them and drive cost out of the business.
d) Human Resources will be continuing to manage the fallout from reduced work-forces and the implications of outsourcing.

a) Maintaining a great place to work culture whilst maximising efficiency.
b) Enhancing the customer experience vs. cost of service.
c) Navigating through emerging technologies. Integration of multiple technologies and core systems.
d) Development programs at an individual level across the company."

"While we are unable to align priorities with specific roles, In October of 2009, NICE announced the results of its first annual Benchmark* of contact center business and technology trends. The comprehensive global research focuses on growth expectations, technology investment priorities, operational tactics and strategies, and market trends and initiatives. The research results were published in a white paper entitled, "Preparing for the Upturn: Research on Contact Center Operational and Investment Practices." The Benchmark was commissioned by NICE Systems and conducted by Ventana Research, an independent third-party firm.
The Benchmark aims to assist contact center business and technology professionals in better assessing their own plans and strategies in light of the overall industry. Key research findings include:
• Customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and compliance are top operational priorities: companies are focused on increasing customer satisfaction and reducing operating costs. For financial services companies, regulatory compliance was a key priority, along with increasing customer satisfaction.
• Growth in contact center interactions: 44% of respondents expect increases in customer interactions, both in phone interactions and as driven by the availability and maturation of alternate communication channels, such as instant and text messaging and web self-service. Growth in customer interactions is also attributed to the economic turmoil; for example, in the financial industry, many more customers are calling to receive information about their finances, voice their personal financial concerns, and to refinance their mortgages.
• Speech analytics deployments to grow by 182%: Respondents foresee planned speech analytics deployments growing by 182% by 2011 from first half 2009. Interviewees noted that speech analytics presents an opportunity for obtaining valuable insights on key business issues from a readily available and historically overlooked information source—call recordings.
• Over 50% of infrastructures to be VoIP-based by 2010: As a technology that helps reduce operating costs, VoIP was noted as a high investment priority, with 70% of respondents indicating that they plan to have more than half of their infrastructure VoIP-based by 2010. Furthermore, large multi-site enterprises are centralizing their contact center operations, made possible by advancements in VoIP-enabled solutions, and as a result are prioritizing investment in VoIP.
• Workforce Optimization investment growth greater than CRM: Agent workforce optimization and performance management systems also ranked high, significantly outpacing expected growth in CRM investments.
• Staffing levels to remain steady, growth in home-based agents: 81% of respondents expected staffing levels to remain steady or increase slightly, with 37% anticipating an increase in home-based agents.
* About the Research Methodology
A total of 370 responses are included in the survey results. Respondents represent a varied sampling of contact center sizes and industries including Service Providers, Financial Services, Manufacturing, Telecommunications and Government and commenced in the first half of 2009. The majority of those surveyed were from North America (74%) with EMEA, APAC and South America regions also represented via a statistically valid sample. In addition to the formal survey, in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with senior level business and IT personnel from forty contact center organizations."

"Contact center Directors - Mainly on the operations side"

a) Finding new customers to make up for the decreased net return due to current economics.
b) Motivate people through recognition and extra training.
c) Finding new ways to tailor the platform that will allow a face to face approach: For instance it would be great to offer video conferences at low cost in the business to business sector.
d) HR must acknowledge that top ranking directors impact personnel at all levels and therefore if there are major issues those must be firstly resolved at that level..engagement does not come easily"

"Enabling the right technology in order to be able to increase efficiencies and reduce budget costs around payroll. I think this can apply at all levels of management and oversight."

"A) Recognise how much their part of their company's business they have played in keeping the company viable, and to build upon this in centering the Contact Centre within the company focus for customer service and activity growth.
B) Similarly the other Executives need to understand they are not able to go it alone. Business is a Team game!
C) IT Directors need to stop being so precious about their pet technologies and start to focus on delivering the functionality the Contact Centre needs and to do so now!
D) HR Directors have to lead the revolt that is overdue with respect to the "rights" of employees to drive companies into the ground. Strip away many of the recently introduced Politically Correct legislation and rules or simply be French and ignore them!"

A) & B) Increase profitability while reducing costs
C) Introduce the updated applications, CRM...
D) Study managed services, outsourcing and reaching high calibers.

"A) Balance call volume with labor resources and morale levels."

A) To maintain or improve operation metrics (service level, shrinkage, etc.)
B) To offer better and less expensive solutions to current and new customers
C) To keep or improve technologies that provide more reliable connection and to have better security controls.
D) Try to maintain this year’s low attrition (even though it was caused due to the crisis factor), looking for better procedures, creating new strategies to motivate the agents."

a) Improve service - relocate off shore service to "home"
b) budget costs
c) Saas and Social Media (SCRM)
d) Staff Loyalty