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With the contact center being a key point of contact for many customers, it should have easy access to customer information owned by other parts of the organization. In many cases, this flow of information has become relatively unobstructed, with information about customers and their spending patterns integrated into various business divisions.

According to the report, 34.4% of contact centers use the same segmentation as their broader organization, up 10% over last year’s results. These contact centers are using customer segmentation to raise service levels to new heights, tie in customer loyalty and secure greater spend within their market.

“If you’re driving improvement in customer satisfaction, ensuring you have a ‘one and done’ philosophy is key,” said Cara Diemont, editor of the report. “Answering the phone quickly is no longer enough. As customers have become more sophisticated in the way they judge the success or failure of their interactions with an organization, keeping them satisfied is more complex than ever.”

Top lessons learned from the segmentation trend are:

Customer care…all talk and no action?

• Just 36.0% of organizations have a single view of the customer across voice, email, chat and Interactive Voice Response (IVR). Yet over 50.8% of contact centers have a single view when it is across products and services; 48.2% across customer data and 46.0% across customer transaction history. As companies realize the true value of retaining existing customers, there has been a distinct move away from separate segmentation strategies with figures dropping to 26%.

One for all and all for the customer still the best way to go.

• Everyone in the organization should support the customer. Contact center goals should be in synch with broader organizational goals and be applied across multiple channels to create “good customer karma” especially in hotly competitive global markets. Incredibly, 30% of contact centers believe developing a single view does not apply to them.

Doing more with less still a top concern.

• Over 74.3% of contact centers want to reduce the cost of serving customers without adversely affecting service quality. In 2006, more than 80.5% say that increased competitiveness and price sensitivity is making this goal even more important than ever.

Mature markets understand the drill.

• Mature markets, like telecommunications and financial services, need greater segmentation of product and services to keep customers happy. Segmentation is key so companies can more effectively target groups with appropriate marketing messages in order to balance customer objectives with cost-to-serve metrics.

“The way to unlock the true value of the contact center is the practice of customer segmentation,” Diemont said. “Having the right information at the right time can reduce call lengths and increase the likelihood that a customer situation will be resolved in one call. One and done is gaining in appeal.”