A 5% improvement in customer retention improves profitability by 25 to 100%. (Bain & Co.) 

Cutting customer defections by just 5% has the effect of boosting profits between 25% and 95%. (Harvard Business Review.)  

The availability of support centers seems to be increasing. A survey showed that 60% of respondents currently provide round the clock support for customers. (Support Industry, 12/2001.)

The size of the service automation software market, worth $2.32 billion in 2001, will grow to reach $4.4 billion by the end of 2006. (Datamonitor, 2/5/2002.)  

Circuit switched technology still makes up over 90% of investment dollars being spent on telecommunications networks. (Venture Development Corp., 9/2001.)  

About 90% of call centers use some kind of agent monitoring, mostly through manual systems, while only 20% of call centers employ some type of recording product. (Frost & Sullivan.)  

A typical Global 3,500 firm will spend $15 to $30 million per year on software and services for its customer conversation. (Forrester Research, 3/2001.)

Call Center Careers surveyed 492 call center professionals to determine what their staffing plans were for the remainder of 2001. 48% said that they would be increasing the number of staff in their call center despite the softening of the US economy. 38% said that they would be reducing headcount and 14% voted that they would neither be expanding or reducing headcount.

1,000 call center job seekers were polled to determine what they disliked most about their most recent job. The leading responses were a lack of promotional opportunities (26.4%) and a feeling of being unfairly paid for the work they perform (24.2%). Other sources of job dissatisfaction include employees feeling they are not recognized for their hard work (20.4%), employees feeling bored and unchallenged by their job (17.8%), and employees feeling they have not received enough training to perform their job well (11.2%). (Call Center Careers, 1/2002.)

More than 2 billion people will use Internet voice portals, voice-enabled Web sites, and Web-based IVR systems by 2005. (Davidson Consulting.)  

There will be 71 million voice portal users by 2005, up from 4.4 million users in 2001. (Allied Business Intelligence.)  

By the end of 2001, 25% of customer contacts will come through IP-based channels. Accordingly, purchases of IP contact center solutions are expected to grow by more than 100% annually from 2001 to 2004. (Gartner Group, via Aspect, 6/2001.)

In 2005, sales of speech recognition software engines, the basis for all speech recognition products, will     reach $2.7 billion. (Cahners In-Stat, 7/2001.)

Speech interaction reduces the time of a banking call by 35% compared to a touchtone call, according to a benchmark study on bank call centers by the Center for Customer-Driven Quality at Purdue University. The Purdue study on banking call centers also states that agent-assisted calls in banking cost almost $4 per call compared to 45 cents per call for automated speech recognition. (Purdue University, 12/2001.)

Research suggests that the worldwide market for telephony speech processing software might grow to over $3.5 billion by 2005. This represents a 2001-2005 compound annual growth rate of 52.1%. Automatic speech recognition (ASR), one of three core speech technologies, will account for 96.2% of the total 2005 revenue. The conversion of text into speech (TTS), another speech technology, will account for 3.1% of total revenue in 2005, while voice recognition (VR) will account for only 0.7%. (IDC, “Worldwide Telephony Speech Processing Software Market Forecast and Analysis, 2001-2005,” 12/2001.)

Worldwide customer relationship management (CRM) spending will reach $76.3 billion in 2005, up from $23 billion in 2000. (Gartner Group, via Aspect, 6/2001.)

70% of CRM projects “fail to live up to expectations.” (Meta Group, 12/2001.)

A survey of nearly 300 North American companies implementing customer relationship management (CRM) programs found that more than four of five companies are outsourcing the construction or maintenance of at least some part of their CRM solution. The survey found that 70% of respondents provide inside sales persons access to customer data as part of their CRM solutions. Among those sites planning to build CRM solutions during the next 12 months, 94% plan to provide CRM access to customer service/tech support and 85% to the inside sales team. (Harte-Hanks, 5/2001.)

$65 million worth of CRM licenses were sold in France in 1999 -- a 44% increase over the previous year. CRM products sell primarily among service organizations, while the industrial sector represents 25% of sales. (IDC, via Primus, 2/2001.)