In my entire tenure here at CRM magazine, I never thought that I would have Clint Eastwood in the title of any of my pieces. I included the Chairman of the Board in a story last year, but it was kind of a stretch.

Thank you, International Customer Management Institute (ICMI) for channeling the inner Western Cowboy in all of us with your latest study, “2008 Contact Center Operations Report.” The study culls responses from what it calls “a critical mass of contact center professionals from around the world,” coming up with some interesting results broken down into the good, bad, and ugly. Not unlike the famous movie starring Eastwood in 1966 except for the fact that there were no dead bodies or shootouts in the production of this research report … I hope.

While the study found that contact center pros were doing some good things, there were also plenty of harrowing places the study finds they can improve upon.

The good:

• most centers realize the importance of call monitoring;
• many formally reward and recognize agents who consistently meet or exceed key objectives; and
• the majority of respondents correlate employee reward/recognition with improved service quality, higher customer satisfaction, and greater agent morale.

The bad:

• most rely on internal quality monitoring instead of external customer surveys to measure satisfaction;
• only 40 percent of respondents even measure agent satisfaction; and
• 25 percent have no disaster recovery or business continuity plan in place.

The ugly:

• in approximately three out of four centers, leaders — be it supervisors or managers — are rarely held accountable for agent retention;
• only 39 percent measure first call resolution; and
• one in three centers do not measure customer satisfaction.

It’s a common theme that while contact centers are starting to do some things correctly, many of the basics are still falling by the wayside. You can’t improve what you don’t measure, and the fact that almost 33 percent of contact centers surveyed still don’t measure customer satisfaction — one of the main goals of any customer service outlet — can be seen as downright pitiful.

Taking into account the fact that many contact centers have had a rough decade, the economic recession is arguably a great time for many to get back to basics with customer service. It only makes good business sense to keep the customers you have already.

For our contact center employee readership, do these results surprise you? What are you seeing in your own organizations right now?