Abstract
“The customer is king” was a phrase first used in retail environments, but has become common parlance in most customer-facing organizations -including those that have not traditionally referred to their users as ' customers' , such as the public sector- thanks to the importance businesses now place on their customers. The Future Customer-Centric Organization: Best practice and new strategies for improving customer service is a new report published by Business Insights that examines the applications and services that have evolved to support organizations' customer service efforts. This report analyses the drivers behind the growing emphasis on customer service and the emergence of the customer-centric enterprise model. It also explores developments in contact center technology designed to assist customer service initiatives and opportunities for making outsourcing contact centers a success. Drive loyalty and revenue by understanding and fulfilling your customer' s needs more effectively by developing a more customer-centric organization with the help of this new report.
Table of Contents
Executive summary
- The importance of customer satisfaction
- The role of IT in improving customer service
- Know your market
- The IP platform
- Mobility
- Virtual contact centers
- Making outsourcing a success
- The vendor landscape
Chapter 1 - Introduction
- What is this report about?
- Who is this report for?
- Definitions
- Computer Telephony Integration (CTI)
- Customer service automation
- Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC)
- Hosted applications
- IP-PBX
- IP telephone
- Mobility
- On-demand applications
- Service-oriented architecture (SOA)
- Software as a service (SaaS)
- Unified communications
- Voice/data convergence
Chapter 2 - The importance of customer satisfaction
- Summary
- Why customer service matters
- Customer service in the utilities market
- Understanding customer satisfaction in this market
- Measuring customer satisfaction
- Customer service in financial services
- The key goal of the financial services provider is to meet or exceed its customers' expectations
- Customer service initiatives play a crucial role in maintaining customer loyalty
- Measuring customer satisfaction
- The customer-centric enterprise
- Evolution of the customer-centric enterprise
- IP-based communciations
- Contact center virtualization
- Multi-channel communications
- Selling solutions to the contact center market
- Short term challenges
- Medium term challenges
- The end game
Chapter 3 - The role of IT in improving customer service
- Summary
- Introduction
- Drivers behind the CRM market
- Contact center optimization technologies
- Improving customer satisfaction is a top priority
- Supporting the customer-centric enterprise
- Barriers to the deployment of customer-centric technology
- Scheduling and forecasting in a distributed environment
- Monitoring agents anywhere
- Providing performance management irrespective of location
- The role of workforce optimization
- WFM vendors extend their reach into the enterprise
- Speech analytics and quality monitoring
- eCoaching modules help to eliminate customer frustration
- Contact center analytics
- Unified agent desktop applications
- Efficient and effective interactions lead to greater customer satisfaction
- Developing customer-centric optimization technologies
- Targeting non-traditional customer service agents
- Speech analytics and eCoaching will continue to grow in QM
- Contact center analytics need to be open and flexible
- Unified agent desktop tools
Chapter 4 - Know your market
- Summary
- Introduction
- Managing diverse regional markets for contact center technology
- A growing emphasis on customer service in the Middle East
- The market opportunity
- Various industries and geographies are influential in the customer interaction industry
- Customer service learnings
- Outbound capabilities open channels for commercially orientated customer care
- Workforce optimization applications will gain traction
- Vendors must educate end users about competitive opportunities provided by better customer service
- System convergence
- Vendor strategies for targeting the Middle East
Chapter 5 - The IP platform
- Summary
- The IP era
- Both end users and customer experience driving convergence solutions
- Cost and confusion inhibit convergence
- IP telephony
- The voice/data convergence market is growing steadily
- Unified communications
- Future outlook for voice/data convergence
- IP-PBXs will eventually replace traditional TDM systems
- Price pressure will increase as solutions mature and the market slows
- Interoperability with mobile devices and enterprise applications will increase
- The market for IP contact centers
- IP contact center growth
- IP technology spending
- The future of IP contact centers
- Distributed contact centers and remote workers
- Offshoring
- Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
- Small and Greenfield contact centers
- Hosted IP contact centers
- Implications for vendors
Chapter 6 - Mobility
- Summary
- Introduction
- The role of speech in mobile field services
- Spending on speech-enabled mobile field services applications
- Speech is gaining momentum in field services
- Successful strategies for deploying speech in mobile field services
- The growing role of mobility in unified communications
- The availability of UC solutions for mobile devices is increasing
- Mobility will help drive investments in unified communications
- FMC and ' one number' solutions will become a reality
- Greater security implications and demand for mobile management
- Changing lifestyles and flexible working
Chapter 7 - Virtual contact centers
- Summary
- Contact center virtualization in the customer-centric enterprise
- The need for a central platform and multi-directional communication
- Drivers of virtualization
- Customer-centric business SMBs
- Inhibitors to virtualizing contact centers
- Employee unwillingness to engage in customer contact
- Lack of central visibility
- People and process issues
- Risk behind virtualization
- Costs associated with virtualization
- Take-up of contact center virtualization
- Unified communications in virtual contact centers
- Challenges for unified communications in a virtual environment
- All-in-one solutions may not be best for larger enterprises
- The promise of presence may not be essential
- Vendor actions
- Educating the market and delivering flexible solutions
- Overcoming the people and process issues
- Virtualization growth not dependent on regional and vertical markets
- Develop strong partnerships with global systems integrators
- Invest in switch independent contact center solutions
- Pricing contact center seats
Chapter 8 - Making outsourcing a success
- Summary
- Introduction
- Vertical market opportunities
- Emerging markets
- Travel and hospitality firms look for a commercial edge
- Concentrate on price sensitivity
- Focus on commercialization
- Look for opportunities from new contact channels
- Hotels as a source of hidden value
- Demand for improved customer service in healthcare outsourcing
- Emphasis on customer service levels
- Automated service options
- Partnership with existing healthcare non-contact center BPO providers
- Sell offshore as a niche solution
- Opportunities for public sector outsourcing
- Emphasize agent quality and lower costs
- Engage government procurement specialists
- Target key government agencies for outsourcing business
- Embrace eGovernment opportunities
- Utilities' demand for outsourced customer service
- Emphasize opportunities to build customer satisfaction
- Cost management potential
- Product / service integration services
- Outsourcing strategies for success
- Shifts in horizontal requirements from outsourcing investors
- Adopting new agent models and leveraging self-service technology
Chapter 9 - The vendor landscape
- Summary
- Leaders and challengers
- Market leaders: Oracle and SAP
- The challengers: Chordiant, Infor and Salesforce.com
- Future vendor strategies for success
- Emerging players
- Microsoft
- Apple, Google and Yahoo!
- IBM
- More collaboration between vendors but increased competition
- Index
List of Figures
- Figure 2.1: Changing emphasis on customer service
- Figure 2.2: Evaluating customer satisfaction
- Figure 2.3: Different types of customer service
- Figure 2.4: Financial services firms acknowledge the importance of customer service
- Figure 3.5: Planned use of technology to enhance business growth
- Figure 3.6: Top 3 technology investment priorities over the next 12 months
- Figure 3.7: Top 3 technology investment priorities over the next three years
- Figure 4.8: Spending on contact center technology in the Middle East, 2005 - 2010 ($m)
- Figure 5.9: IP telephony investment strategies
- Figure 5.10: Enterprises take a staged migration to IP telephony
- Figure 5.11: Global voice/data convergence market revenue, 2006-2012 ($m)
- Figure 5.12: The convergence of voice and data systems provides the opportunity for unified communications
- Figure 5.13: Total IP Aps (000s) and IP Aps as a percentage of total
- Figure 5.14: Global IP vs TDM inbound routing spending
- Figure 6.15: Common mobile applications in the enterprise
- Figure 7.16: Customer service silos in the contact center
- Figure 7.17: Unifying disparate systems into one enterprise-wide communications system
List of Tables
- Table 5.1: The importance of objectives to the convergent communication investment strategy in 2007
- Table 5.2: Issues preventing your organization from investing in voice/data convergence technologies
- Table 6.3: Global spending on speech-enabled mobile field services applications, 2005-2010
- Table 7.4: Remote workers as a percentage of total Aps globally, 2005-2010
- Table 7.5: Remote workers components, 2005-2010

