$!Contact.getFName(),

The US Contact Center Operational Review, a free study of over 200 contact center operations, carried out by ContactBabel in association with the American Teleservices Association (ATA), has found that:

- Contact center agent attrition is running at 33% per year, and two-thirds of contact centers report major problems with keeping their staff

- The use of VoIP will triple within two years: reduction in telephone & network costs is the biggest driver for IP uptake

- The average annual starting salary for a new agent is just under $28,000

- Contact centers spend $11.7 billion each year on manually verifying callers' identities

- Hitting call targets is seen as more important than improving customer satisfaction or decreasing costs

- Increasing headcount, improving training and implementing CRM are the top 3 areas of contact center expenditure in the next 2 years

Sponsored by Intelemedia, Syntellect and VoiceVault, The US Contact Center Operational Review is over 250 pages in length and looks in depth at salaries, attrition, training, multimedia, IP, self-service, strategies, outsourcing, planning and many other elements that are key to understanding how contact centers can best be run.

Displayed in over 200 data tables, the results have been segmented by industry sector and contact center size, so that readers can compare their own operations with those that are most similar.

The report, created in association with the American Teleservices Association is entirely free and can be downloaded from www.contactbabel.com.

Education and quality research is a core belief of the ATA. ContactBabel’s research is reliable and beneficial to the growth of business. Companies are interested in accurate, timely and relevant benchmarking information to improve operations in contact centers, and our partnership with ContactBabel delivers on that need.

I hope you enjoy the report.

Tim Searcy
ATA CEO