New research released today reveals that organisations spend some £2,500 per month per agent seat to provide customer service through their contact centres. This includes staff, technology and other facilities and management costs. When applied to an estimated 6.5 million contact centre seats worldwide, this translates to an investment of £17 billion.

These results from Dimension Data's Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report 2007, which surveyed 403 contact centres located across 42 countries, underscore the need for management to ensure greater productivity and effectiveness from contact centre resources.

Cara Diemont, editor of the Report comments: "The challenge for executives and contact centre management is to ensure that organisations get the best return on investment for both business and customers. Two key levers they can focus on to achieve this are call resolution and automation."

The Report indicates a drop in the percentage of calls resolved by the first agent over the past three years: from 82.1% in the 2005 Report to 80.7% in 2006 and 69.8% this year. Also, contact centre agents spend around 60% of their time speaking to customers, responding to e-mails and handling queries. These two findings are concerning: 40% of the investment made in agent seats is not directly linked to customer interaction and when it is, only seven out of ten calls are resolved by the first agent.

"Unresolved calls frustrate customers and cost organisations money. If companies improve call resolution and agent utilisation, contact centre effectiveness can be substantially improved," says Diemont.

The second lever is automation, which is widely regarded as a critical strategy for contact centres. The 2007 Report highlights that automating processes or parts of processes is the top re-engineering and improvement priority for contact centres (54.9%). But a word of warning: keep top of mind that processes determine the 'how' of contact centre operation.

"Many organisations focus on process automation and overlook the inescapable fact that automating a poorly defined or executed process will not improve the situation," says Diemont.

Self-service is an automation strategy that is increasingly being adopted by organisations. Currently, 13.5% of contact centres use speech recognition while a quarter plan to implement it.

"Success rates with voice-driven self-service have also improved, with completion rates on self-service continuing to climb - 19% compound growth on last year - across the board," concludes Diemont.