As a broad range of industries feels the effects of a tight economy, call center managers are under increasing pressure to get greater value out of their agents. Given that two-thirds of call center costs are directly related to the agent, simply put, companies want to get more "bang for their buck" out of each agent.
However, getting more bang for the buck is no easy feat in today's market. The contact center agents' job has become increasingly complex, partly because of increased use of CRM applications and partly because of the proliferation of multi-media contact centers. The agent's responsibility has been expanded from simply answering telephone calls to include the following:
Add to this that retention levels are steadily decreasing (according to Call Center Compensation Survey, blended inbound/outbound customer service and sales agent turnover in North America increased to 94% in 2001, up from 61% in 2000), one can understand that getting more bang for the buck becomes an increasingly difficult prospect.
Faced with concerns over agent retention and customer satisfaction, combined with the growing recognition that contact center agents are the personal voice of the business, an increasing number of companies are turning to agent efficiency applications, such as quality monitoring (QM) and workforce management (WFM), to enhance contact center performance.
Yesterday's market
Formerly, vendors of technologies aimed at improving agent performance, sold point applications rather than suite solutions. Applications would address specific pain points in agent performance, often neglecting the larger picture of the total agent efficiency cycle (pictured below). However, the desire to increase wallet share, and in some cases to drive revenue in slow growth markets, has predicated the need for vendors to change this aspect of their business model and purvey suite solutions to the contact center market.
Therefore, QM, WFM, eLearning and agent analytics systems have advanced from being stand-alone products to become part of an integrated contact center solution set. This trend has resulted in the emergence of the workforce optimization market. Datamonitor defines workforce optimization as a business process designed to maximize the efficiency and functionality of call center agents.
The following diagram depicts the segmentation of workforce optimization technology revenues in 2001, by application. Datamonitor estimates that for 2001 the global workforce optimization market was worth $550 million.
While workforce optimization solutions are vertical-market agnostic there have been a number of industries that have been more adept to deploy these technologies. They are financial services, communications, technology and outsourcing. Market maturation will change the representation of these vertical markets over the next five years. Nevertheless, financial services, communications, technology and outsourcing will remain among the most important verticals for workforce optimization vendors in both the short and long-term.
As the North American call center market matures, vendors are steadily moving into international markets, particularly Western Europe. However, the Western European market varies greatly by region in terms of the size and shape of each market. Differing cultural and language issues, regulatory environments (despite the existence of the EU), types of economy, infrastructure and a number of other issues will force vendors to approach each market differently.
The future decoded
The future workforce optimization market will have a very different composition from today's makeup. eLearning and agent analytics will make up 43% of the total market, up from 22% in 2001. This will be led in part by QM vendors who will shift their product offerings from point solutions to upgradeable packages to include agent analytics and eLearning functionality.
The following diagram depicts the segmentation of workforce optimization technology revenues in 2007, by application. Datamonitor estimates that by 2007 the global workforce optimization market will be worth $1.5 billion.