Only one third of contact centres in Singapore are measured as profit centres and this is causing the country to fall behind the rest of Asia, according to callcentres.net.
The call and contact centre research company released its 2008 Asian Contact Centre Industry Benchmarking Report today which reports results from contact centre industries in Singapore, China, India, The Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand.
The research, sponsored by Autonomy etalk and Genesys, involved interviewing 539 contact centres executives representing 2,488 contact centres and 259,699 contact centre seats across Asia. A total of 59 Singaporean based organisations were involved in the study.
The study assessed contact centre strategy, revenue generation, operations, human resource management, technology, customer service, channel management, outsourcing, key performance indicators and management challenges. A total of 59 Singaporean based organisations were involved in the study.
Results of the study reveal that the Asian Contact Centre Industry is in a period of transition from the provision traditional service and support to being service and sales or revenue generation focused. The results suggest however, that the Singaporean contact centre industry lags behind other Asian countries in this regard.
The study reports that less than half (49%) of Singaporean contact centre executives believe that their centres have an opportunity to sell to a customer who has called into their centre. Another 49% of Singaporean respondents stated their centres had no opportunity at all to up-sell or cross sell to customers on inbound or outbound calls.
The strongest indication that Singapore is perhaps lagging in its focus on revenue generation compared to the rest of the region is that only 32% of Singaporean contact centres are measured as profit centres and 68% are measured as cost centres. This percentage of profit centres is considerably lower than other markets including Philippines (72%), China (79%) and India (91%) and is comparative to the developing markets of Malaysia (29%) and Thailand (12%).
When asked about revenue generation strategies in the contact centre, 30% of Singaporean contact centre executives stated that they do not have a strategy at all, compared to only 6% in India, 11% in Malaysia, 2% in China and 0% of contact centres in Philippines which had no revenue generation strategy.
“These results are a call to action for the Singaporean contact centre industry as there is currently a global trend towards contact centres becoming profit centres and being the primary channel for sales and revenue generation,” said Dr Catriona Wallace, President of callcentres.net.
“Excellent service should entail fulfilling a customer’s initial requirement, then through natural conversation identifying additional needs and offering solutions to meet those needs.
“Singapore already has a good standard of service in its contact centres that should now perhaps extend to service and sales.”
According to the study, other areas that Singapore contact centres are failing to capitalise on are next generation voice self-service and advanced speech recognition applications. Today, only 8% of Singapore contact centres said they are using voice self-service (compared to 15% of Malaysian centres and 32% of Indian centres) and only 14% said they plan to implement it within the next 14 months. This low adoption rate is hindering Singapore companies from achieving the efficiency gains and improvements to customer service that can be delivered by these advanced applications.
“Leading companies worldwide, including their CEOs, have recognised the power the contact centre has to drive customer loyalty and increase revenue,” said Michael McBrien, Senior Vice President, Genesys Asia Pacific.
“To achieve this, companies need to expand their contact centre operations model by better segmenting customers and expanding the agent resource pool to experts to deliver targeted and relevant offers. Companies also need to understand and embrace the Web and next-generation voice self-service – these new technologies are redefining the customer experience and increasing companies’ ability to engage with their customers." |
