By Sharla Sikes

Today’s tough economy has made it more important than ever that businesses build close relationships with their customers.

Some companies haven’t caught on yet, though. 

Dimension Data announced in a report that customer relationship management tools in the $130 billion global contact center industry were of a lower priority to improving operational efficiencies, reducing costs and improving services. The information, taken from the 2008 Dimension Data Contact Center Benchmarking Report, includes responses from 300 contact centers in 36 countries.

“Minimal progress has been made in adopting a more customer-oriented, CRM- based approach within the contact center over the last 10 years since the Benchmarking Report was initiated,” said Alex George, Dimension Data spokesperson for the Benchmarking Report. “When we compared this year’s findings with those from our inaugural report, the picture is not positive.”

Report results show that ten years ago, almost 40 percent of participating businesses had the capacity for establishment of a single view of the customer, and 45 percent planned to soon. The current study, however, found a 13 percent decrease.

The report details declines in other areas, such as companies able to measure or actively employ customer metrics, such as ways to gauge customer lifetime value and profitability.

“These findings indicate that the development of a more holistic and sophisticated approach to customer management is less of a priority today than it was 10 years ago, and there is a back-to-basics trend with contact centers focusing more on basic performance efficiencies and cost reduction,” George said. “This is also reflected in the commercial drivers of contact centers. Only 16% of participating centers ranked ‘creating direct customer relationships’ among their top three commercial drivers, compared with over 50% 10 years ago. This underscores that there has been a major shift away from the tenets of CRM over the last decade.”

Why the move away from a focus on CRM initiatives? It’s possible that contact centers may have been unhappy with CRM packages’ performance—and the underlying question there is, were the systems faulty? Or only improperly managed?

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