Next Generation Contact Center PDF

A Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper Commissioned By Aspect Software
The Next-Generation Contact Center

October 2012
Forrester Consulting
Table Of Contents
Executive Summary ................................................................................................................................................................................. 2
Solid Technology Is A Cornerstone Of A Customer Experience Strategy ................................................................................... 2
Delivering Good Customer Experiences Is Important, Yet Difficult To Do................................................................................ 5
Customer Service Organizations Are Victims Of Complex Contact Center Technology....................................................... 11
Evolving To A Next-Generation Contact Center ............................................................................................................................ 15
Conclusion: Four Steps To A Better Customer Experience........................................................................................................... 17
Appendix A: Methodology................................................................................................................................................................... 18
Appendix B: Supplemental Material .................................................................................................................................................. 18
Appendix C: Endnotes .......................................................................................................................................................................... 18
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Executive Summary
Today, the gap between a customers expectations and the service they receive is huge. Customers are increasingly
knowledgeable about the products they use and demand value-added, personalized service in real time, using voice,
text-based media like email and chat, and social media. They are quick to voice their disappointment about poor
customer experiences; social media can amplify these negative views, which can lead to brand erosion.
Businesses know that good service is important: 90% of customer service decision makers tell Forrester that delivering
good service is critical to their companys success; 63% think its importance has risen. 1 Yet businesses today are battling
the ongoing economic pressures of a prolonged global recession. Most companies pragmatically balance the cost of
doing business with customer satisfaction.
Businesses must be pragmatic about engaging in initiatives that will deliver service in line with customer expectations at
a cost that makes sense to the business. One successful way to help move the needle on an improved customer service
experience in a way that is cognizant of business cost parameters is by focusing on the technology that is at the heart of
contact centers. Next-generation contact center technology allows you to standardize the customer experience across
supported communication channels. It provides agents with a unified desktop so they can simultaneously handle
multiple interactions; access customer, product, and history data and content at the right point in an interaction;
increase their efficiency; and improve the quality of each interaction. This technology also provides managers the
flexibility to access real-time reports and analytics to quickly adapt to changing business demands.
In addition, improved technology delivers an overall lower cost of ownership. Businesses that fail to focus on their core
contact center technology risk being left at a competitive disadvantage. In April 2012, Aspect Software commissioned
Forrester Consulting to evaluate the current trends in next-generation contact center technologies through conducting
an in-depth survey with 308 US and Canadian Enterprise Customer Service Strategy Decision Makers.
Solid Technology Is A Cornerstone Of A Customer Experience Strategy

The customer experience is defined as the sum of all experiences a customer has with a company over the duration of
their relationship ----- including awareness, discovery, attraction, interaction, purchase, use, customer service, and
advocacy. Technology plays a large part in delivering these customer experiences: 73% of survey respondents view
technology as playing a large to very large role in their customer experience strategy. 2 Equally important is the
alignment of a companys contact center strategy with a companys customer experience strategy. Forty eight percent
say that their contact center strategy is the cornerstone of their customer experience strategy, and 45% are in the process
of aligning their contact center strategy to be able to support their customer experience strategy (see Figure 1). It is
comforting to know that only 7% of respondents see their contact center as a cost center that is not aligned with their
companys customer experience strategy.
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Figure 1
Companies Have Properly Aligned Their Customer Experience Strategy With Their Contact Center Strategy
What is the relationship between your contact center strategy and your customer experience strategy?
Our contact center

is seen as a cost
center, and its
operational goals
are not aligned with
our customer
experience strategy
7%
Our contact center
Our customer strategy is a
experience strategy cornerstone of our
is defined. We are customer
in the process of experience
aligning our contact strategy. Strategic
center strategy to goals are well
our customer aligned
experience strategy 48%
45%
Base: 308 enterprise customer service strategy decision makers in the US and Canada
Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Aspect Software, June 2012
Barriers That Contact Centers Face

Contact center leaders face barriers that prevent their organizations from making better use of technology to improve
their contact center capabilities. It is not surprising that cost is by far the largest barrier for all types of contact center
leaders (see Figure 2). Secondary barriers include lack of budget, lack of business agility in choosing technologies that
can easily adapt to changing business pressures, and user resistance to adopting or better utilizing current technologies.
The actual barriers being dependent on the profile of the respondent:
User adoption and lack of business agility challenge respondents who focus on the customer experience.
Respondents who view their contact center as a cornerstone of their customer experience strategy state that the
second-most important barrier they face is resistance from technology users (29%) and the third-most important
barrier is that it is too difficult to change existing business processes (25%). For respondents who are in the
process of aligning their contact center strategy with their customer experience strategy, the same two answers tie
for the second-most important barrier they face: 34% say that it is too difficult to change business processes and
another 34% say that they face resistance from users of the technology.
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Lack of budget challenges respondents who view their contact center as a cost center. For respondents who
view their contact center as a cost center, the second-most important barrier is no budget (64%) and the third-
most important barriers are resistance from users of the technology and the difficulty of changing business
processes (32% each).
Figure 2
Organizations View Cost As The Biggest Barrier To Better Using Technology To Improve Contact Center Capabilities
Which of the following barriers prevent your organization from better using
technology to improve your contact center capabilities?
Our contact center is seen as a cost center, and its operational goals are
not aligned with our customer experience strategy. (N = 22)
Our customer experience strategy is defined. We are in the process of aligning our
contact center strategy with our customer. (N = 140)
Our contact center strategy is a cornerstone of our customer experience
strategy. Strategic goals are well aligned. (N = 146)
77%
Cost is too high 61%
51%
64%
No budget 24%
17%
32%
Resistance from users of the technology 34%
29%
32%
Too difficult to change business processes 34%
25%
Incumbent vendor too difficult to replace/ 18%
14%
contractual obligation to existing vendor 23%
14%
Unfamiliarity with appropriate technologies 24%
16%
18%
Difficulty working with IT 15%
16%
23%
Unsupportive CEO or upper management 11%
9%
Unfamiliarity with appropriate professional services 9%
18%
providers 10%
0%
None of the above 12%
21%
0%
Other 1%
1%
(multiple responses accepted)
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Delivering Good Customer Experiences Is Important, Yet Difficult To Do

Because of the decline of the economy and the commoditization of products and services, businesses turn to the
customer experience as a differentiator in order to stand out from the crowd. In fact, the survey shows that 67% of
organizations say that improving customer experiences is one of their top three priorities. 3 However, organizations
today are investing in better customer experiences in a pragmatic way ----- one that balances the cost of serving
customers with a focus on creating a competitive advantage, increasing revenue from expanded product portfolios, and
increasing investments in improving online/web customer experiences.
Figure 3
Organizations Have A Well-Balanced Approach To Contact Center Goals
What will your firms three most important contact center goals be over the next 12 months?
Most important Second-most important Third-most important
Reducing the costs of serving customers 19% 18% 13%
Creating competitive advantage 15% 14% 10%
Expanding product offerings to increase revenue potential 19% 12% 8%
Improving the online/web customer experience 10% 12% 11%
Improving the profitability of customers 12% 11% 9%

Improving the experience of interacting with contact center
9% 11% 11%
agents
Improving the cross-channel customer experience 5% 6% 6%
Offering additional communication channels (e.g., email, chat,
2% 6% 8%
SMS) to existing customers
Offering a mobile experience to customers 1%3% 7%
Improving the phone self-service customer experience 3% 4% 4%
Improving the store/branch customer experience 4% 2%3%
Offering social channels to customers 1% 6%
Catching up to the competition 1%3%
Few Companies Deliver Positive Customer Experiences

Even though businesses know that they can reap quantifiable business results by focusing on the customer service
experience, few businesses deliver good service. In 2012, Forrester reported that only 37% of companies earned a
customer experience index rating of excellent or good (the index measures the ease, usefulness, and enjoyment of
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doing business with a company). Almost two-thirds of brands delivered an okay to very poor customer experience;
most telecommunications companies delivered a poor or very poor experience. Banks, credit card providers,
Internet service providers, and health insurance companies had the biggest gap between their top scores and lowest
scores, indicating that this segment has a significant number of quantifiable business opportunities. 4
Its evident that delivering good customer experiences is hard. Todays world is increasingly complex; contact centers
need to assist customers with more and more complex products and services and are forced to do so with limited
resources. As a result, first call resolution and satisfaction metrics decrease.
In addition, customers expect to be able to connect with contact centers over a range of communication channels and
receive consistent experiences across them. They also demand instantaneous service. Forrester data shows that 45% of
US adults will abandon an online purchase if they cannot find answers to their questions quickly; 66% say that valuing
their time is the most important thing that a company can do to provide them with good customer service; and 29% say
that they prefer to engage with customer service online rather than speaking with an agent. 5
Specifically, contact center organizations struggle to:
Use social media effectively when interacting with customers. 58% of survey respondents agree that managing
social media inquiries is their top challenge today. Contact centers face an onslaught of social media inquiries,
which must be answered effectively to avoid negatively affecting the companys brand proposition. Contact
center organizations lack the applications to effectively manage social media escalations, lack the ability to map
social identities to customer records in order to better personalize interactions, and often use immature and
inconsistent business processes to respond to customers via social channels.
Deliver consistent experiences across multiple communication channels. Customers want to use an increasing
number of media types when receiving customer service. In the past 12 months, 68% used the phone, 60% used
help or FAQs, 54% used email, 37% used chat, 20% used SMS, and 19% used a microblogging platform. 6 Contact
center agents supporting these media types need access to the same data and information in order to ensure
consistent customer experiences. However, over half the survey respondents say that doing so is a challenge.
Enable customers to use multiple communication channels during a single interaction. Customers expect
consistent, value-added answers across all media. They also expect to be able to start an interaction using one type
of media and complete it using another without having to restart the conversation. Survey data shows that 43% of
organizations struggle to support customers multichannel journeys. This is not surprising: Forrester data shows a
lack of attention to integrating communication channels to provide a seamless experience; only 21% of
organizations plan to do so in 2012. 7 These communication channels ----- and the agents supporting them ----- are
siloed from one another. Agents do not have a full view of prior customer interactions across all supported
communication channels, which means that they are unable to personalize and contextualize an answer to a
customer request.
Manage the workflow of interactions from the front office to the back office. 42% of survey respondents say
that they are unable to effectively manage the end-to-end workflow of interactions; this is primarily due to
unintegrated applications. This introduces process inefficiencies, affecting productivity and escalating costs.
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Enterprises Recognize The Risk Of Not Getting The Technology Right

Contact centers are unique in that the impact, risks, and return on investment of technology are clear. Companies
continue to struggle to drive a more effective path to improving contact center systems in a more programmatic fashion
instead of using a conservative, incremental approach (see Figure 4). Specifically, they struggle with:
Poor implementation and technology. Across the board, enterprise managers recognize that their competitors
will not sit still. Companies now have the option to drive increased customer support across channels ----- and if
they dont, others will.
Inconsistent service levels and quality. A poorly architected contact center results in problems that hinder
agents from delivering great customer service. It limits supervisors and managers ability to make the day-to-day
tactical decisions required to keep service and quality in line with expectations.
Loss of efficiency. The ongoing struggle to balance service levels, quality, and efficiency is one of the top
concerns when looking at the underlying technology in the contact center.
Figure 4
Risks Of Poor Deployment
What are the risks of not adopting new technology in the contact center?
Competitive disadvantage 61%
Inconsistent customer service

60%
delivery
Internal operational inefficiencies 47%
Customer defection 41%
High agent turnover rates 29%
Long agent training times 28%
Penalties for noncompliance 17%
Other 1%
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Challenges Also Include People And Business Processes

Challenges to delivering good customer experiences are not limited to siloed technology that is unable to support
customer expectations (see Figure 5); they also revolve around:
Staffing --- 57% of survey respondents believe that finding, attracting, and retaining the right workers with the
correct skills is the biggest challenge.
Business processes --- 52% of survey respondents believe that their technology infrastructure is brittle and
inflexibly wired together. Changing business processes is their second-biggest challenge.
Data --- 51% of survey respondents struggle with data challenges; creating a single view of customer data and
information is their third-biggest challenge.
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Figure 5
Customer Experience Challenges Revolve Around People, Processes, And Data
What are your organizations biggest challenges to improving the overall

customer experience that your contact center currently delivers?
Most challenging 5 4 3 2 Least challenging 1
Finding, attracting, and retaining staff with the correct skills 22% 35% 24% 13% 5%
Creating a single view of customer data and information 15% 36% 28% 14% 7%
Changing existing business processes 15% 37% 27% 16% 4%
Gaining user acceptance of new technologies 12% 31% 28% 24% 6%
Working with IT to adopt new technologies 11% 23% 35% 23% 7%
Lack of budget 10% 20% 31% 22% 14%
Coordinating across different technology platforms 10% 41% 34% 12% 2%
Measuring results 9% 28% 31% 21% 10%
Defining the business case for investment 9% 24% 36% 23% 7%
Working with business users to adopt new technologies 7% 28% 40% 18% 5%
The contact center is not viewed as mission-critical or of
7% 17% 22% 31% 21%
strategic importance to our company
Managing data quality 7% 36% 34% 17% 5%
Gaining cooperation across the organization to support
6% 27% 36% 23% 8%
customer experience management improvement efforts
Creating operational reports to drive decision-making 6% 25% 39% 25% 3%
Unsupportive CEO or upper management 5% 13% 16% 29% 34%
Other 4% 26% 39% 4% 26%
(percentages may not total 100 because of rounding)
Contact Center Agents And Managers Have Specific Challenges

The increasing number of media types, including social media, place a significant burden on contact centers, where
agents must understand each customers needs and respond to them in a meaningful and personalized way. Contact
center organizations know what a good customer experience is, and know what it takes to deliver it. However, the
reality is that organizations struggle to empower their customer service agents and managers to deliver good customer
experiences. Here are some examples derived from the Forrester survey commisioned by Aspect (see Figure 6):
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Contact center agents are not empowered to set their own schedule. 59% of respondents say that they do a
suboptimal job of empowering their agents to set their own schedules and manage their own work times; this
leads to agent dissatisfaction and increases turnover.
Contact center agents cannot handle inquiries over multiple media. Customers expect consistent answers
across all types of media, personalized for the customer and issue at hand. However, 43% say that agents dont
have the applications in place to handle inquiries submitted over various media types. In addition, 32% say they
dont have access to the right content to answer customer questions consistently and 31% say that agents do not
have the relevant customer, order, past product, or past interaction history that would empower them to deliver
this value-added service.
Customer service agents are not empowered with reporting. Customers expect companies to deliver relevant,
value-added answers within the published SLAs. Agents lack the tools to monitor their performance across the
media types that they support. 52% say that their reporting is suboptimal.
Contact center managers lack the tools to be able to guarantee quality of service to their customers. 45% of
survey respondents say that their managers focus on manual and administrative tasks and dont have time for
strategic initiatives; 43% say that they do not have access to real-time analytics to manage escalations; 36% say
that they cannot manage the quality of customer interactions; and 36% say that they do not have access to reports
to understand and manage customer satisfaction ratings across all supported media types (see Figure 6).
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Figure 6
Contact Center Managers Are Not Empowered With The Right Strategic Technologies To Gain Insights That Drive
Business Results
What challenges do your contact center managers face with the contact center
technologies that agents use to provide service to customers?
Contact center managers focus on manual and administrative

tasks like scheduling and coaching and do not have time for 45%
strategic initiatives
Contact center managers do not have access to real-time

43%
analytics to promptly manage escalations
Contact center managers cannot effectively monitor the quality of

36%
customer interactions
Contact center managers do not have access to unified reporting

for all communication channels supported to understand the 36%
overall performance of their contact center
Contact center managers do not have collaboration tools or

presence indicators to easily communicate with their workforce 31%
and subject-matter experts
Contact center managers do not have workforce management

28%
tools to understand agent utilization and performance
Contact center managers do not have access to reports to

17%
ensure that SLAs and KPIs are being met
Customer Service Organizations Are Victims Of Complex Contact Center

Technology
Todays contact center technology environment is complex and brittle, comprised of point solutions which are used to
manage customer interaction channels, the agent desktop, knowledge management, agent collaboration technologies,
and workforce optimization technologies. Little integration exists between these technologies to support multichannel
interactions. For example, Forrester data shows that only 21% of companies are actively working on integrating their
communication channels. 8
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Challenges Faced During Technology Implementations

Once organizations decide to enhance or improve their contact center technologies, the issues they face are quite
similar to the barriers preventing them from making the best use of it. This reinforces the idea that a more incremental
approach to contact center technology planning and the lack of a solid architecture create problems during the build
and operational phases (see Figure 7).
High costs come out on top ------ again. Enterprises consistently state that they feel that both building and
operating contact center technology is expensive; its their top concern. Enterprises that view their contact centers
as cost centers feel that these expenses are much more of an issue ----- by a margin of 20 to 26 percentage points
compared with companies that feel that their contact center has a more strategic value to their organization. This
is not only related to the difference between cost center and strategic component, but also reflects the more
limited budgets available to develop a more robust architecture and road map.
Infrastructure disruption through rollout. Another issue where there is a large difference between the cost
center and strategic component views is the impact an implementation has on a companys infrastructure.
Moving to a next-generation contact center means migrating away from proprietary ----- albeit highly reliable -----
hardware and software combinations. The evolution of contact center technology is away from these legacy
architectures and toward more standardized servers and web standards-based software that provides higher levels
of integration support and manageability. But this can be more disruptive for cost center-focused contact centers
that lack longer range architectural planning.
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Figure 7
Implementation Challenges Map To Utilization Issues
What challenges did you face during your technology implementations?

73%
High cost of implementation 53%
47%
45%
Complex integration with existing infrastructure 54%
41% 55%
Internal resistance to change 42%
40%
36%
Complex integration among contact center applications 27%
37%
32%
Longer time and higher resource investment than anticipated 35%
30%
41%
Infrastructure disruption through rollout 21% 24%
27%
Fear of noncompliance with regulatory policy 19%
25%
23%
Unrealized benefits in the expected timeframe 22%
23%
27%
Infrastructure incompatibility 20%
20%
9% 25%
Performance and availability limitations
23%
18%
Not everyone can have access to the solution 16%
19%
0%
Dont know 2%
1%
0%
Other
0%2%
Implementation Challenges Have An Impact On Agent Capabilities

Effective change management is a critical success factor in a contact center technology deployment. Unless the
enterprise effectively engages agents in the new capabilities, it will not get a good return on its investment and agents
will deliver lower levels of service (see Figure 8). For cost center-focused contact centers, there is a wide difference in the
range of implementation issues that impair agent productivity.
Getting agents up to speed takes too long. Hiring, training, and retaining agents with the right skills is a
perennial issue in delivering good customer service; its even more problematic for cost center-focused contact
centers. For many enterprises, a confusing and poorly designed agent desktop has a critical impact on agent
productivity.
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Agents are constrained in delivering consistent service across channels. Multichannel support in most
enterprises today is implemented in individual silos, so the agent is confronted with different tools to manage a
customer contact. Because these tools are tied to different back-end systems, the business process rules can end
up being inconsistent, further impairing the agents ability to provide consistent service.
A poor implementation restricts collaboration. Multichannel customer service increases the need for agents to
collaborate to drive first call resolution. This problem will only increase over time, as customers increasingly
demand to connect over different channels to process a request.
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Figure 8
Challenges Translating Technology To Agent Productivity
What challenges do your contact center agents face with the technologies they use to provide customer service?
Training takes too long for contact center agents to become 64%
41%
proficient 38%
Contact center agents cannot easily deliver consistent customer 55%
experiences across communication channels using common 43%
business rules 37%
Contact center agents do not have an easy way to collaborate 55%
with one another or with subject-matter experts to quickly 39%
resolve problems 38%
Contact center agents must use multiple desktops to manage 27%
voice, chat, email, and social inquiries, as these inquiries are all 34%
queued differently 41%
Contact center agents dont have the context of an inquiry that 41%
is escalated to them from a self-service interaction and have to 30%
restart the conversation over with the customer 30%
Contact center agents dont have access to the back office to 23%
be able to effectively answer questions like Where is my 25%
order? 29%
Contact center agents dont have access to relevant and 36%

25%
reliable content to answer customer inquiries 15%
Contact center agents do not have relevant customer or order 32%

25%
history to personalize an interaction 16%
0%
Other 1%
3%
Evolving To A Next-Generation Contact Center

Todays contact center managers recognize the competitive challenges and opportunities that delivering consistent
service across channels presents. However, only rarely do they have the luxury of starting with a clean slate and a blank
check to design, build, and deploy the ideal multichannel contact center. The benefits of improved customer service
coupled with better efficiency are achieved only by having a vision and a strategy and translating those elements into a
solid plan for a next-generation contact center.
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Defining The Next-Generation Contact Center

Information technology evolves based on both market need and vendor innovation. Contact centers have moved more
slowly than other technology markets because of the very conservative way enterprises buy and deploy it. The move to
software-based systems started in the mid-90s and is still very much a work in progress. Additional stimulus in todays
market comes from rapid innovation and advances in consumer use of new technologies for communications and
collaboration. This is the challenge enterprises face in evolving to a next-generation contact center. To move toward the
next-generation contact center, enterprise IT architects need to consider a number of attributes:
Reliability. Because contact centers still largely process voice transactions, they still need to fulfill the
requirement of high availability. Downtime directly translates into lost agent productivity and affects customer
service levels. This will not go away, so it presents a perceptual barrier for enterprise managers when considering
future architectures that are standard server- and software-based. Legacy proprietary systems achieved high
reliability by extensive vendor design, testing, and delivery of closed architectures that prevented unanticipated
interactions between systems. But this is no longer sustainable today ----- and the market has moved to web
standard software-based systems. High reliability can be achieved, but in a different way than contact center
managers are familiar with from prior experience.
Flexibility. A poorly architected contact center creates issues that impair agents from delivering great customer
service. Contact centers have historically integrated a number of best-of-breed, proprietary software- and
hardware-based components that were difficult and expensive to maintain. Making changes to business rules is
also difficult. Many contact center managers simply make do with the existing configuration instead of working
to optimize contact flow rules. Finally, reporting from these diverse systems presents the challenge of having
many sources of the truth and limited analytical abilities.
Standard software suites versus best-of-breed components. More and more contact center managers are
looking to consolidate the range of diverse components in their contact centers by adopting integrated suites.
This is in line with the general IT trend to consolidate supplier relationships, but it also attacks the problem of the
many integration pain points that plague contact centers.
Improving the agent, supervisor, and management user experience. As this study has shown, contact center
managers understand and are concerned about the negative productivity impact that a poor implementation has
on agents, supervisors, and contact center managers. This ties directly to meeting service levels in a cost-effective
manner and impairs the contact center from evolving to a true multichannel operation demanded by consumers.
Standardizing the underlying infrastructure. The integration of voice and data networks onto a common IP
infrastructure leveraging SIP signaling sets the stage for a more flexible multichannel contact center. SIP
inherently supports multichannel, as it was developed to support all media types of communication ----- not just
voice. Contact centers depend heavily on software applications having access to the state of a contact, so the use
of the SIP standard has helped enormously to eliminate the complexity of managing multichannel
communications on one software platform.
The ease of integration of common productivity tools. Agents, supervisors, and contact center managers need
to use productivity tools to develop documents, collaborate using unified communications, run reports, and
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analyze data. Instead of using separate tools specific to each best-of-breed component, today they can leverage
commonly available productivity suites for those capabilities.
Conclusion: Four Steps To A Better Customer Experience

Forrester believes that a good customer experience correlates to loyalty and increased lifetime customer wallet share, as
measured in three classic categories: willingness to consider the company for another purchase, likelihood to switch
business to a competitor, and likelihood to recommend to a friend or colleague. 9 This direct correlation between a good
customer experience and positive business value is evident across the more than 40 industries that Forrester surveyed.
Improving the customer experience is also good for internal operations. Companies that have invested in delivering
better customer experiences report reduced operational costs, greater productivity of their frontline personnel, and
greater business agility ----- a necessary requirement to stay ahead of the competition.
Delivering optimal customer experience is a multi-year modernization and transformation project for the contact
center that takes a coordinated effort across four dimensions ----- strategy, process, technology, and people management.
Start by articulating your customer experience strategy. Your customer experience strategy identifies the
customers your organization intends to serve and articulates the customer experience you want to deliver across
all communication channels and all company touchpoints that are in line with your brand proposition.
Focus on the right processes for your customers. Processes that customer-facing personnel follow to serve
customers have to be consistent across all media types supported, effective in meeting customer requirements,
and agile so they can be changed to support a business changing needs.
Choose technologies that empower your agents to deliver excellent experiences. Contact center technologies
are at the heart of the solution for providing optimal customer experiences. Contact center technology must be
able to standardize the customer service experience across media types, including social media; empower agents
with contextual customer, product, and service information; allow agents to easily collaborate to quickly resolve
inquiries; and provide managers with the right analytics to track outcomes that have a business impact.
Focus on the user experience to drive contact center architecture. Not only is it important to design a system
that delights consumers, but enterprises must also consider the agent, supervisor, and contact center manager
user experience. Developing a solid customer journey map that reflects the enterprise customer experience
strategy and vision is important. At the same time, the architectural views of agent, supervisor, and contact center
manager must be incorporated into the analysis and design.
Dont forget about your people. How people are organized and led are important factors that affect customer
service success and make up your organizations corporate culture, leadership practices, collaboration methods,
training programs, and performance measurement approaches. Its also important to empower your agents to do
the right thing for the customer. They are, after all, your most important asset.
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Appendix A: Methodology
Forrester conducted an online survey of 308 enterprise customer service strategy decision makers in the US and Canada
in June 2012 in order to evaluate the current challenges they face and assess the investments they have made or are
planning to make in contact center technologies to overcome those challenges. 89% of survey respondents were from
the US; 11% were from Canada. 26% worked for large organizations (1,000 to 4,999 employees); 31% worked for very
large organizations (5,000 to 19,999 employees); and 43% worked for organizations with 20,000 or more employees.
19% had 50 to 249 contact center seats within their organization; 22% had 250 to 499 seats; 17% had 500 to 999 seats;
19% had 1,000 to 5,000 seats; and 23% had more than 5,000 contact center seats. Survey respondents had midlevel to-
senior-level job titles. 55% of survey participants work in IT/technology groups, while 45% work in business groups. All
respondents had direct knowledge of their contact center strategy and operations.
Appendix B: Supplemental Material
Related Forrester Research

The State Of Customer Experience, 2010, Forrester Research, Inc., February 19, 2010
Craft Your Contact Center Investment Plans In Light Of Technology Adoption Patterns, Forrester Research, Inc.,
November 7, 2011
The Customer Experience Index, 2012, Forrester Research, Inc., January 23, 2012
Contact Center Purchase Plans 2011, Forrester Research, Inc., October 27, 2011
The Business Impact Of Customer Experience, 2011, Forrester Research, Inc., July 7, 2011
Appendix C: Endnotes
1
Forrester surveyed 141 customer experience decision makers from large North American firms. 90% said that the
customer experience would be either very important for or critical to their 2010 efforts.
2
Forrester surveyed 308 enterprise customer service strategy decision makers in the US and Canada in June 2012, in a
survey commissioned by Aspect. On a scale of 1-5 (where 1 is very low and 5 is very high) 73% of respondents said that
their contact center technologies were rated a 4 or 5 as a key component of their company's overall customer experience
strategy.
Page 18
3
Forrester surveyed 308 enterprise customer service strategy decision makers in the US and Canada in June 2012, in a
survey commissioned by Aspect. 33% of respondents stated that an improved customer experience is their top priority;
15% stated that it is their second-highest priority; and 19% stated that it is their third most important priority.
4
To assess the state of customer experience in 2012, Forrester fielded its North American Technographics Customer
Experience Online Survey, Q4 2011 (US), which asked 7,638 US consumers about their interactions with a variety of
companies. Based on their responses, Customer Experience Index (CxPi) scores were calculated for 160 brands in 13
industries. This years rankings show that only about one-third of brands earned excellent or good CxPi scores, with
the rest ranging from okay to very poor. Retailers and hotels continue to be the two highest-ranking industries,
while health insurance providers, TV service providers, and Internet service providers (ISPs) continue to own the cellar.
5
45% of US online consumers agree with the statement that I am very likely to abandon my online purchase if I cannot
find a quick answer to my questions, and two-thirds agree that Valuing my time is the most important thing a
company can do to provide me with good online customer service.
6
Forrester asked 7,638 US consumers which communication channels they had used to receive customer service in the
past 12 months. Source: North American Technographics Customer Experience Online Survey, Q4 2011 (US).
7
In Forresters Forrsights Networks And Telecommunications Survey, Q1 2011, only 21% of buyers indicated that they
were going to invest in multichannel integration. This implies that many customer service organizations are going to
continue to choose a best-of-breed approach to support multiple channels in their contact centers. This will continue to
limit the firms ability to report on the full scope of customer interactions across different channels and make business
rule changes harder to deploy.
8
Source: Forrsights Networks And Telecommunications Survey, Q1 2011.
9
Years of Forrester data confirm the strong relationship between the quality of a companys customer experience (as
measured by Forresters Customer Experience Index [CxPi]) and loyalty measures like willingness to consider the
company for another purchase, likelihood to switch business, and likelihood to recommend. That data was used to
build simple models that show how changes in loyalty associated with higher CxPi scores can affect a companys yearly
revenue.
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A Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper Commissioned By Aspect Software

The Next-Generation Contact Center

Executive Summary ................................................................................................................................................................................. 2

Solid Technology Is A Cornerstone Of A Customer Experience Strategy ................................................................................... 2

Delivering Good Customer Experiences Is Important, Yet Difficult To Do................................................................................ 5

Customer Service Organizations Are Victims Of Complex Contact Center Technology....................................................... 11

Evolving To A Next-Generation Contact Center ............................................................................................................................ 15

Conclusion: Four Steps To A Better Customer Experience........................................................................................................... 17

Appendix B: Supplemental Material .................................................................................................................................................. 18

Appendix C: Endnotes .......................................................................................................................................................................... 18

About Forrester Consulting

Solid Technology Is A Cornerstone Of A Customer Experience Strategy

Our contact center

Barriers That Contact Centers Face

Delivering Good Customer Experiences Is Important, Yet Difficult To Do

Most important Second-most important Third-most important

Reducing the costs of serving customers 19% 18% 13%

Creating competitive advantage 15% 14% 10%

Expanding product offerings to increase revenue potential 19% 12% 8%

Improving the online/web customer experience 10% 12% 11%

Improving the profitability of customers 12% 11% 9%

Improving the phone self-service customer experience 3% 4% 4%

Improving the store/branch customer experience 4% 2%3%

Offering social channels to customers 1% 6%

Catching up to the competition 1%3%

Few Companies Deliver Positive Customer Experiences

Specifically, contact center organizations struggle to:

Enterprises Recognize The Risk Of Not Getting The Technology Right

Competitive disadvantage 61%

Inconsistent customer service

Internal operational inefficiencies 47%

Customer defection 41%

High agent turnover rates 29%

Long agent training times 28%

Penalties for noncompliance 17%

Challenges Also Include People And Business Processes

What are your organizations biggest challenges to improving the overall

Most challenging 5 4 3 2 Least challenging 1

Changing existing business processes 15% 37% 27% 16% 4%

Gaining user acceptance of new technologies 12% 31% 28% 24% 6%

Working with IT to adopt new technologies 11% 23% 35% 23% 7%

Lack of budget 10% 20% 31% 22% 14%

Coordinating across different technology platforms 10% 41% 34% 12% 2%

Measuring results 9% 28% 31% 21% 10%

Defining the business case for investment 9% 24% 36% 23% 7%

Unsupportive CEO or upper management 5% 13% 16% 29% 34%

Other 4% 26% 39% 4% 26%

Contact Center Agents And Managers Have Specific Challenges

Contact center managers focus on manual and administrative

Contact center managers do not have access to real-time

Contact center managers cannot effectively monitor the quality of

Contact center managers do not have access to unified reporting

Contact center managers do not have collaboration tools or

Contact center managers do not have workforce management

Contact center managers do not have access to reports to

Customer Service Organizations Are Victims Of Complex Contact Center

Challenges Faced During Technology Implementations

What challenges did you face during your technology implementations?

Implementation Challenges Have An Impact On Agent Capabilities

Contact center agents dont have access to relevant and 36%

Contact center agents do not have relevant customer or order 32%

Evolving To A Next-Generation Contact Center

Defining The Next-Generation Contact Center