Technology is only ever as good as those people charged with using it – but for UK contact centres, training agents to use technology is considered to be straightforward. 38% of contact centre managers think training agents to use new technology is ‘very simple’, 10% think it’s ‘challenging but not impossible’ while 47% think it’s simply a ‘challenging’ part of their normal role to train agents to use new technology. Surprisingly, homeworking was not as popular among the call centre managers surveyed as might have been expected - only 18% of contact centres benchmarked have home-based agents.
Nadahl Shocair, Communio Networks’ CEO, comments: “It’s great news for our industry that a good portion of the sample of managers we spoke to are planning to increase their IT spend next year – with some looking to invest as much as 50% more than this year. The priority now must be to identify those areas that can provide a strong improvement to the performance of the call centre and the customer experience, while providing the necessary return on investment to keep the Finance team happy. This is not an easy challenge but we’re confident that the UK call centre industry has the skills and experience to succeed.”
“We’re a little surprised not to see more homeworking positions out there, as this is an area where the new world of IP telephony can really make a difference. However, despite the press attention it’s received recently, VoIP is still relatively immature, so we can expect this figure to rise significantly over time.”