Unamic/HCN

In October 2009 Dimension Data's Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report, 2009 has been published. This report is a key resource for decision makers and managers in the contact centre industry. The Report covers the full breadth and depth of managing a contact centre - performance, processes, organisation, technology, as well as strategy, financial and customer management.

Hereunder you find the major themes and findings from 2009.

The Evolution of Customer Contact
This year's Benchmarking results indicate that, as an industry, we are on the cusp of the next stage of evolution. More and more organisations are recognising that the contact centre can play a key role in the creation of value for the business.

Even though we are seeing businesses wanting to shift focus to value generation, it doesn't mean that we forget about doing the basics and optimising costs.

One of the main proof points from this year's results, that this transition is underway, is an increase in the number of respondents who reported that they have implemented initiatives that identify trigger events in service environments that can generate value through cross or up-selling opportunities. We're also seeing an increase in the number of organisations who are tackling CRM at a far more practical and pragmatic level.

From a technology perspective, companies that are making this move to value creation are focusing their attention on integration initiatives to deliver solutions that enable this service and sales capability. We expect to see this transition to value creation to take the next three to four years to fully take hold and it is within this context that we expect to see investment decisions made over the next period. It's not something that happens overnight and we need catalysts to create change; the economic conditions in which we're now operating may well be that catalyst.

Some of the major themes and findings from 2009

A mixed bag for operational performance
Looking at aggregated operational performance data always requires a degree of license. Overall, we would summarise this year's operational performance as 'mixed' - there have definitely been no great strides forward or any significant decline in standards.

Call volumes still on the rise
Overall call volumes have risen slightly this year, contradicting predictions of the demise of contact centres as self service and contact avoidance initiatives are developed. Growth in call volumes is more pronounced in emerging markets. Since the onset of the Global Economic Crisis there has been a clear shift in the reasons for customer contact.

Complexity for agents
Average Handle Times have continued to creep up but we believe that this is largely down to the migration of the simpler, commoditised transactions to self service channels which continues to increase. This obviously leads to front line agents having to handle more complex interactions that often require a greater degree of empathy, communication skills and access to the relevant information.

Still work to do on management information
Management Information (MI) reported at board level under the guise of Strategic MI is still too focused on service levels. Instead of focusing on the inner workings of the operation, strategic MI focuses on outcomes. We believe this is an issue across the industry and we are still measuring the wrong things for the wrong reasons.

Process optimisation remains primary focus
From a customer and agent perspective, the ongoing trend towards more End-to-End Process Automation is good news. Through increasing the number of processes that can be handled within contact centres, hand-offs will reduce as will operational costs.

Outsourcing still a cost decision
While we continue to see the role of outsourcing maturing, the top three reasons for outsourcing are all cost related. Cost remains the biggest driver for adopting an outsourcing strategy, but it is encouraging to see results that indicate a more balanced approach to outsourcing decisions.

Customer lifetime value is back on the radar
Over the past 12 months there has been a positive indicator trend suggesting that organisations are looking to improve the way they show how Customer Lifetime Value is impacted by customer interactions taking place in the contact centre.

Channels are still to siloed
Organisations are still not using customer insight across the organisation. It's a clear and disappointing indicator of the extent of the challenge facing the industry to deliver a joined up end-to-end experience.

Why not measure cost per interaction
A third of all contact centres report that they do not measure the cost per interaction of agent assisted telephone calls. When you consider that this is the most accurate means of determining the cost effectiveness of an operation, it is a worrying trend that we have not seen improve in recent years.

Segmentation becomes more sophistocated (But fewer people are doing it)
More companies are using increasingly sophisticated methods of segmenting and differentiating their customers. There appears to be a very real desire to generate more value from customer interactions. What is worrying though, is the drop in the number of companies using segmentation.

Home-working becomes a reality
The number of home-working agents is generally growing in more mature markets across the globe. A large proportion of respondents are considering home-working, signifying a major shift in approach to employee management, where benefits include lower staff turnover and cost, improved productivity and reduced travel through the use of technology.

Hosting and 'on-demand' becomes mainstream
Most contact centres are still owned and managed within the organisation. The number of centres owned by organisations continues to drop year on year. With hosted technologies more secure and easier to manage than in the past, we expect to see an increase in the number of hosted centres due to the economic climate and convenience of the technology.

Source: Dimension Data

Unamic/HCN has been nominated bij theSales Management Association (SMA) for the Piet Heyn SMA Award 2009. The Piet Heyn Award will be given tot a Dutch enterprise who stands out of the crowd through courage and vision in the market.

The Dutch market leader in the area of offshore customer contact, Unamic/HCN, sees an increase of 25% in customer contact activities contracted out to Suriname and Turkey by Dutch companies in 2009. Having customer contacts handled offshore appears to be an attractive way to reduce costs substantially, while still maintaining the quality required by clients. Thus, this trend follows the tendency to outsource to offshore locations that has for years been widely accepted in the domain of ICT services. Countries like Surinam and Turkey are popular as offshore destinations for customer contact activities because of the broad availability of trained people whose mother tongue is Dutch. This growth trend is influenced by the current economic circumstances but also by the generally improved image of the quality of customer service in the low wage countries. The typical customer contact activities carried out in offshore locations are customer service, technical helpdesk and back office processes. In order to anticipate the strong increase of offshore contracts, the workforce of Unamic/HCN in Surinam is currently being expanded from 300 to 400 and the company commissioned the building of a new and bigger contact center in Paramaribo earlier this year.

CanalDigitaal has chosen Unamic/HCN for its customer service. The collaboration concerns a co-sourcing construction whereby from July 1, 2009 Unamic/HCN will carry out the telephone customer service from CanalDigitaal's location in Hilversum. For this the communication platform used by Unamic/HCN will be rolled out to Hilversum and Unamic/HCN installs its own work places at CanalDigitaal.

Hans Reuver (commercial director at Unamic/HCN): "We are very happy with the collaboration with CanalDigitaal. Both our companies suit each other with respect to culture, something that is very important when you go 'in house' with a customer. After all, our colleagues now vist CanalDigitaal every day." 

Andrei Noppe (managing director at CanalDigitaal): "We sought a partner with experience in the co-sourcing model and we found it in Unamic/HCN. The fact that we soon come together under one roof makes the communication link literally and figuratively shorter and provides a higher grade of efficiency from which our clients ultimately must benefit."

By merging contact center organisations Unamic and HCN in October 2008, one of the largest Benelux organisations in the field of outsourcing of customer contact and customer processes arised.

The Unamic/HCN organisation consists of three business units: Contact Centers, Financial Services and Interim Management & Training and its core business is taking over customer processes, both individual and as part of a process chain.

Besides this, the support of (inhouse) customer contact operations by means of interim management and training activities is part of the services of Unamic/HCN.

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