2011_ContactBabel - Syntellect

PLANNED IT EXPENDITURE
Analyzing the areas that contact centers are focusing their IT expenditure upon is quite complicated, as there is
rarely exact concurrence or use of the same phrases.
Figure 139: Most important areas of IT expenditure in the next two years
Expenditure type 1st 2nd 3rd
ACD/PBX/VoIP 24% 8% 8%
Self-service 12% 10% 8%
CTI / call routing 9% 8% 3%
CRM 9% 2% 3%
Increasing channels / multimedia 7% 4% 13%
Hardware upgrade 7% 2% 5%
Cloud computing / hosted applications 5% 2% 0%
Workforce management 3% 13% 5%
Homeworking and virtualization 3% 4% 10%
Queuing and callback 3% 0% 0%
Speech analytics 3% 0% 0%
Desktop optimisation 2% 10% 5%
Social media 2% 6% 3%
Knowledge base 2% 4% 5%
eLearning and online assessment 2% 2% 8%
Call recording 2% 2% 3%
Reporting 2% 0% 0%
Outbound automation 0% 6% 5%
Customer satisfaction and experience improvement 0% 6% 5%
Disaster recovery / redundancy 0% 2% 3%
Other IT expenditure 3% 6% 13%
Many contact centers last replaced their telephony systems in 1998 or 1999, to avoid potential problems around
Y2K. Many of these systems have already been replaced, with businesses then moving to IP. However, 24% of
respondents named upgrading their telephony system as the most important area of expenditure, with a further
16% putting it as their second or third priority.
Self-service moves up in importance in this year's survey, with 12% of respondents putting this as their no.1 IT
investment priority, and a further 18% rating it as no.2 or no.3.
CRM was also an important area of spend money on, although it has dropped compared to past years.
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