With the Australian Government’s Do Not Call Register (the ‘Register’) celebrating its first full year of operation this month, findings from the Dimension Data Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report 2008 (the ‘Report’) reveal that it has not adversely affected Australia’s largest contact centres.

A total of 54 Australian contact centres were surveyed for the Report, equating to nearly a fifth of the total global sample. Participants were primarily from some of Australia’s largest organisations including representatives from banking, government, insurance, retail, telecommunications and transport.

When asked ‘What has the impact of the Do Not Call Register been on your overall outbound calling volumes?’ 91.7% of Australian participants stated that it had either had no impact or no change on volumes. A follow-up question ‘What has the impact been on your campaign success rate?’ elicited a similar response with 90.5% claiming that it has had no impact. Overall outbound call volumes include calls to existing customers exempt from the Do Not Call rules and unsolicited calls.

In response to these findings, one of the authors of the Report, Ian Dundas, Principal Consultant, Customer Interactive Solutions, Dimension Data commented, “Given that the Register received over one million registrations in the first month of operation, and is now sitting at well over two million, this is really heartening news. In the lead-up to the introduction of the Register last year, there was a lot of anxiety as to its potential negative impact on Australia’s contact centre industry.”

“That said, the majority of organisations who participated in the benchmark survey were larger enterprises and are not using unsolicited calls as a way to sell their products and services. Most have already moved beyond the ‘hit and miss’ nature and poor conversion rates of these types of outbound sales campaigns.”

“What they are doing very well with is inbound marketing campaigns and outbound customer satisfaction and ‘update’ calls: recognising cross-selling opportunities during these types of calls with existing customers.”

Other Major Australian Findings

Globally, the Report found that 31% of all inbound transactions are completed on a self-service channel. Highest among these is Interactive Voice Response (IVR) self-service (15.5%), followed by Web self-service (13.7%), with speech self-service and Web co-browsing making up the balance. The findings also show that Australia deploys the most effective IVR self-service solutions, with 51.2% of transactions successfully completed by customers through this channel.

“This is world leading and reflective of Australia’s language consistency and telecommunications infrastructure quality and availability. With one of the highest densities of mobile ownership in the world, we have a highly mobile population – and the convenience offered by IVR to transact with business translates into this phenomenal voice self-service completion rate,” said Jason Thals, National Solutions Manager, Customer Interactive Solutions, Dimension Data. Thals was also a co-author of the Report.

In contrast to this positive result for self-service, Australia reported a much lower Grade of Service (‘GOS’) performance than the global average. Australian contact centres achieved performances of 55.6% and then 69.1% in the 10 and 20 second target categories respectively compared to global averages of 65% in 10 seconds and 72.8% in 20 seconds for average time to answer rates.

“We need to consider the Australian results in the context of a massive rise in voice self-service availability in 2007. The poor grade of service result may be a case of overly ambitious business cases re-assigning staff before the benefits of self-service implementations have been fully realised,” said Thals.

Routing to the most appropriate contact centre agent is becoming more popular, with over 44% of contact centres globally utilising this strategy and over 60% of these organisations indicating that they are prepared to breach their GOS to enforce this rule.

The Australian results showed that 35.7% would make a caller wait longer to route to the best resource and of those the vast majority (71.4%) confirmed that those routing rules allow the wait time to breach GOS targets.

“Again, the effective use of self-service in Australia ensuring the availability of a caller identifier and enquiry type enables a more sophisticated method of routing and answering calls than a ‘first in first out’ approach,” said Thals.

For more findings and news on Dimension Data’s Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report 2008, please go to http://www.ccbenchmarking.com/News/NewsPressReleases.htm.

ENDS

About Dimension Data

Dimension Data plc (LSE:DDT), a specialist IT services and solution provider, helps clients plan, build, support and manage their IT infrastructures. Dimension Data applies its expertise in networking, security, operating environments, storage and contact centre technologies and its unique skills in consulting, integration and managed services to create customised client solutions. www.dimensiondata.com

About the Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report

First published in the UK in 1997 by Merchants, Dimension Data’s specialist contact centre outsourcing and operations division, this year’s edition is the tenth in a series of the industry-renowned benchmarking reports. The Report has balanced global and industry representation from 300 contact centres located across 36 countries and five continents, and is an invaluable reference for all contact centre professionals. It provides managers with a set of best practice standards and benchmarks, including staffing and training, performance metrics, technology usage, budgets and development plans. The Report is researched and published by Dimension Data. For more information about the Report, please go to www.ccbenchmarking.com.

For further information please contact: Helen Han Dimension Data Tel: 02) 8249 5684 helen.han@didata.com.au