Survey: Contact Centers Seeing Green

November 12, 2007

An “on the conference floor” survey of executives attending the CCA Annual Convention, conducted on behalf of Softlab, finds that contact centers are seeing green, much like their IT counterparts.

According to the survey authors:

Businesses across all sectors are beginning to understand the benefits of adopting green strategies within the contact centre and, as a result, plan to put in place strategies to improve their environmental performance.

However these companies are not going green simply for the sake of being environmentally conscious, rather they need to see the business benefit.

According to Softlab senior consultant, Lisa Olafsdottir:

“…going green for green’s sake is not a current business goal. With productivity and revenue gains seen as the most important drivers for implementing a green policy — by 26% and 24% of respondents respectively — companies do want to be seen to be taking steps to reduce their impact on the environment, but only if it makes commercial and financial business sense.”

Some other interesting findings from the survey:

53% of respondents already have a green policy in place, though many, unprompted, expressed concerns regarding the quality of the current policy. Perhaps surprisingly, nearly one quarter (22%) don’t know.

Similarly, only 41% have a specific employee in place responsible for ‘green’ issues, with no such champion in 26% of respondent organizations. Again, 33% were uncertain as to the existence of such a role within the business.

The most commonly used contact center applications include workforce optimization tools (adopted by 72% of respondents), followed by Voice over IP (VoIP) (71%) and multi-channel solutions (62%). Other technologies such as speech-activation, self-service and instant messaging are in place in less than 50% of organizations.

Softlab believes that contact centers should consider the appointment of a green ‘champion’ to actively promote environmental activity and formulate a plan to enhance the processes within the organization.

“In short,” Olafsdottir concludes, “saving money and improved environmental performance are no longer mutually exclusive… in today’s world of hard-headed, RoI-based business decisions, being green makes real commercial sense.”