Survey: 48% Plan to Increase Contact Center Spending

According to research from Indianapolis-based American Teleservices Association nearly half of survey respondents planned to increase contact center spending. Among the key findings on spending and investment plans:

• The largest percentage of contact center executives — almost 48% — expect spending to increase.
• 25% of all executives expect their spending in the contact center to increase between 6% and 25%.
• Only 12.1% expect their spending to decrease, with the largest number of executives (4.75%) anticipating that their spending will decrease between 6% and 10%.
• 40.1% of contact center executives surveyed believed that spending would remain the same.

When asked if their company planned “new deployments or significant upgrades” of various contact center technologies and services, 49% of the executives claimed that they have no plans to either deploy or upgrade a multichannel contact center technology within the next 18 months. But 51% of the contact centers have already either deployed or plan to deploy multichannel technologies.

Likewise, 57% do not plan deployments or upgrades of IP-based contact center technology within a 18-month timeframe, with 43% planning either initial implementations or upgrades of IP-CC technology.

The top five technology investments cited by executives over the next 18 months included

1. Analytic tools for the contact center (61%)
2. Multichannel contact center (51%)
3. Interactive self-service (50%)
4. Enterprise routing (49%)
5. Workforce management (49%)