Dimension Data: The Age of the $33 Billion Seat

New research released today reveals that organisations spend some
USD 5,000 per month per agent seat to provide customer service through
their contact centres. This includes staff, technology and other
facilities and management costs. When applied to an estimated 6.5
million contact centre seats worldwide, this translates to an
investment of USD 33 billion.

These results from Dimension Data's Global Contact Centre
Benchmarking Report 2007, which surveyed 403 contact centres located
across 42 countries, underscore the need for management to ensure
greater productivity and effectiveness from contact centre resources.

Cara Diemont, editor of the Report comments: "The challenge for
executives and contact centre management is to ensure that
organisations get the best return on investment for both business and
customers. Two key levers they can focus on to achieve this are call
resolution and automation."

The Report indicates a drop in the percentage of calls resolved by
the first agent over the past three years: from 82.1% in the 2005
Report to 80.7% in 2006 and 69.8% this year. Also, contact centre
agents spend around 60% of their time speaking to customers,
responding to e-mails and handling queries. These two findings are
concerning: 40% of the investment made in agent seats is not directly
linked to customer interaction and when it is, only seven out of ten
calls are resolved by the first agent.

"Unresolved calls frustrate customers and cost organisations
money. If companies improve call resolution and agent utilisation,
contact centre effectiveness can be substantially improved," says
Diemont.

The second lever is automation, which is widely regarded as a
critical strategy for contact centres. The 2007 Report highlights that
automating processes or parts of processes is the top re-engineering
and improvement priority for contact centres (54.9%). But a word of
warning: keep top of mind that processes determine the 'how' of
contact centre operation.

"Many organisations focus on process automation and overlook the
inescapable fact that automating a poorly defined or executed process
will not improve the situation," says Diemont.

Self-service is an automation strategy that is increasingly being
adopted by organisations. Currently, 13.5% of contact centres use
speech recognition while a quarter plan to implement it.

"Success rates with voice-driven self-service have also improved,
with completion rates on self-service continuing to climb - 19%
compound growth on last year - across the board," concludes Diemont.

About Dimension Data

Dimension Data plc (LSE:DDT), a specialist IT services and
solution provider, helps clients plan, build and support 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 ninth in a series of the industry-renowned
benchmarking reports. The report has balanced global and industry
representation from 403 contact centres located across 42 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