Call centre staff monitoring spend to hit $1.2bn by 2008

Companies will spend $1.2bn worldwide on call centre monitoring and analysis technologies by 2008 in an attempt to increase efficiency and productivity, according to a new report by analyst Datamonitor.

That is a staggering rise from the $695m spent on what the analysts call "workforce optimisation technologies" in 2003, with a return on investment possible in less than a year.

The fastest growing areas are in agent analytics, which analyse the performance of call centre staff, and online earning packages that can improve their performance in key areas. They are predicted to rise to $39m and $294m respectively by 2008 – more than double the figure for 2003.

Quality monitoring and analysis of telephone and data interactions between customers and call centre agents is another area of growth and is predicted to grow to $414m by the end of this year. Tom Pringle, associate technology analyst in CRM at Datamonitor, told silicon.com that these can also improve the quality of a call centre agent's job – and in turn productivity - despite the perception that many of these technologies are used to monitor things like keyboard inactivity and toilet breaks.

"I don't think that this technology is invasive," he said. "A lot of the time it is aimed at improving the agent's working conditions."

An example of this is the predicted growth in 'agent empowerment' - which, according to the report, allows staff to use scheduling products to influence their working days and to book holidays.