Mid-size contact centres are lagging behind large-sized contact centres in the take-up of new technology, new research has shown.

Genesys and ContactBabel analysed different elements within the contact centre, including the use of multimedia and the average speed to answer calls, and found mid-sized contact centres devoted significantly less investment in email than larger call centres.

According to the figures, nearly 70% of mid-sized centres – staffing 50-200 agents – chose an ad-hoc approach to email management, compared to 50% in large-scale centres of more than 200 staff.

Only one in five mid-sized contact centres use a universal queue model, which results in 40% of emails taking longer than 24 hours to resolve, said the report.

Another area of significant disparity was in the differences between Capex and Opex. During the same period, only 33% of mid-sized contact centres saw any Opex growth, much lower than in the 51% for large contact centres

Steve Morrell, principal analyst at ContactBabel, said: “This research shows that mid-sized operations do indeed face many of the same issues and problems of large contact centres, but have not been able to implement similar solutions due to budgetary restraints and the lack of dedicated resources to implement and maintain them.

“Businesses should look for solutions which have been re-engineered to remove the requirement for complex technical and training capabilities, while retaining the functionality that is really required by their contact centre.”