The Global Association for Contact Center Best Practices & Networking

"I believe the greatest challenge has been the attrition due to high costs leading to financial crisis in the contact centers. The contact centres decided to downsize the manpower in the centers."

"The temptation to outsource to non-native english speakers due to cost pressure."

"Responding to the pace of change as consumers utilise more and more social media type channels and in response many enterprises are paralysed in terms of how to keep pace."

"Various types of fraud and criminal charges stemming from them have been a big problem to the industry. With fraudsters getting more and more sophisticated in terms of technology and phishing tools this trend will continue to get worse before it gets better."

"I believe it is still agent attrition at least in the offshore locations where we do business."

"The biggest challenge in the contact center industry has always been around hiring. A contact center agent is the face of the company, and a bad hire can be incredibly damaging to the brand and the business. In our research, we've found the performance gap between the best agents and the worst is surprisingly large, with good agents being twice as productive and scoring better on customer service metrics as well. Although there is a lot of technology that helps contact centers get smarter and more efficient, at the end of the day, the single biggest determinant of success is the quality of the hiring process."

"Integrity is still the greatest challenge"

"I believe the greatest challenge the outsourced contact center industry has faced in the last 12 months was keeping up with amount of work being outsourced. The economy remained fickled in 2011 and it seems that more and more businesses explored the outsourcing of more and more of their contact center processes. Our company, as an example, has significantly grown in the previous twelve-months with new lines of business that weren't necessarily outsourced (at all) in 2010."

"Meeting increasing work-loads whilst at the same time maintaining or reducing costs"

"The challenge has been twofold. One the one hand, there has been an extraordinary demand for high-quality contact center solutions, resulting partially in a shift of accounts and partially in the resolution of new customers to enter outsourcing. On the other hand, existing customers have scrutinized the quality of their contact center services, searching for excellence."

"Social technologies are transforming our world and customers are increasingly using the Internet as their first touch point to get answers quickly and easily and turning to discussion groups or social networks such as Twitter and Facebook to find answers to their questions—and to air their grievances. This is bringing a whole new set of challenges to customer service representatives— it can be challenging to handle questions and complaints in public."

"Offshore centers not putting forth the quality that our clients deserve.
Clients expect experienced agents and managers to set up and service their
accounts.
"

"adapting to the changing environment"