Frost & Sullivan: What to Expect from Transforming APAC Contact Center Market in 2012

Though the different markets in the region present different set of opportunities, common theme of the year was "need to grow faster, acquire more customers and gain sustainable competitive advantage". Depending on their position in the technology adoption curve, APAC enterprises upped investment in the areas of capacity expansion to self-services, started to leverage performance optimization suites and analytics, explored cloud based platform and services, initiated effort to understand mobile, social media as channel and their impact on costs and profitability while managing customer experience. 

 

Dramatically changing communication landscape, driven primarily by the evolving behavior of younger generation, is forcing enterprises to rethink their customer strategy and evolve. Customers still value speed, accuracy and ease of use, but they added a few elements as pre-requisite of a quality customer experience: the convenience of performing ever-more-complex transactions on the go, personalized service at every instance, and seamless movement among various channels with a consistent experience at each. 

 

As traditional contact centers are evolving to become customer management centers, in this process it is also transforming itself to be seen as "strategic part of the organization" rather than a "cost center". They are likely to adopt some of these trends to varied degrees to meet the 4Cs of customer engagement: convenient, comfortable, consistent and customization. 

This insight attempts to discuss some of the industry trends that are likely to change the face of contact centers in the world and especially in Asia Pacific: 

 

Changing Role of Contact Center 

With soaring customer expectations, entire organization's commitment in engaging with customer and enhancing experience will be the norm. Unified Communications tools will help organizations to leverage larger enterprise workforce as part of the customer service process. Adoption of optimization tools such as workforce management & performance tools in the back-office coupled withworkflow management applications bodes well for efficient contact centers. We saw some early adoption in markets like Australia in 2011 and expect this to gain traction in other markets as well. 

 

Analytics Transforms Contact Center to become Strategic Part of Organization 

However, the biggest change in contact enter comes through the power of analytics. In the connected era of competitive business environment it is critical to understand customer behavior to drive revenue growth, build experience & improve operations and margins. Key focus is in 2012 is likely to be in stitching different forms of analytics across the organization to leverage newfound actionable insights possibly in real-time to make smarter decisions throughout organization and enhance customer experience.

 

Even More Self-Service 

Considering very high percentage of Generation-Y, who has certain preference for self-service, organizations in the region are likely to enhance their options for such channels. Further investment is likely to be on web and mobile self-service going beyond traditional IVR. Application of real-time analytics is across those channels is likely to improve resolution rates enhancing customer experience. 

 

Establish Seamless Multichannel to DeliverContextual Service Experience 

Increasingly connected customer base expects switches across customer services channels (both physical and digital) based on their convenience and expects communications thread tomaintain the context and offer same level of personalization across. Markets in Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, India and China saw good investment towards establishing multi-channel in 2011. Along with Australia, parts of these markets are likely focus now on integration of different channels and presenting information to agents in unified manner in 2012. 

 

Embrace Social Media Applications 

After education/ early experimentation phase in 2011, APAC organizations are likely to move ahead in the next phase in 2012 to seriously integrate social media channels as part of their multi-channel strategy to leverage this as powerful self-service mechanism and a platform for proactive real time engagement with customers. Solutions vendors are likely to play the advisor role in such initiatives of organizations when "best practices" become more pronounced. 

 

Mobile Access to Customer Service, Perhaps a Dedicated App 

 

With smart phone and mobile broadband penetration in the region going through the roof, mobile may has great potential to be the primary customer services channel. Organizations will have to invest to make their virtual presence optimized for access on such devices. In 2012, many larger organizations are expected to go one step further in launching Mobile Applications empowering customers with choices including escalation to webchat and voice to interact with customer service agents. 

 

UC Applications Extends Contact Center to Back Office 

UC applications such as Presence, Instant Messaging (IM) and Conferencing are increasingly to be deployed in the contact center in order to extend into back office and making a larger knowledgebase available for customer service. For example, an agent can now easily reach an available expert to resolve complex issues or branch/ remote workers can step in during call surge in the centers or at certain down time. Realizing obvious benefits, such integration efforts are likely to gain further steam in 2012 especially in the advanced markets in the region. 

 

Video Finds Place in Contact Centers 

Surging Internet connected mobile devices (smart phones/ tablets) with video capability is likely to make organizations think how they can leverage video for customer service. Video content (self-help guide, video demo etc.) complementing other resources or direct agent-to-customer video interactions is likely to receive wider acceptance in 2012 before becoming mainstream. 

 

Leverage Cloud to Derive Greater Value 

It would be incomplete without the mention of Cloud computing. In 2012, cloud computing is set to become mainstream in Asia Pacific. Indeed, approximately 30% of APAC organizations have already adopted some form of cloud computing. Contact centers too started to explore how it can help them operate more efficiently and compliment their premise based offerings. Flexibility, scalability and cost benefits augur well for cloud contact center and sets up good base for adoption in the region in 2012. More solution vendors will offer applications in the cloud and offer customer's with choices suiting their business needs and scale at that time. Incumbent Telcos, Global Service Providers and large System Integrators too are likely to proactively promote such solutions to customers. 

 

In a nut-shell contact centers are likely to enhance self-service not limiting to just IVR (Integrated Voice Response) but also on Web self-service and mobile self-service; investment in social media applications, implement multi-channel service for customer engagement, and leverage analytics to truly live up to be a strategic part of the organization. Would that recognition be the Holy Grail for contact center transformation?