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By Jo Best, 17 February 2005 15:00

NEWS While call centres are increasingly realising that IT strategies are vital for business, call centre IT budgets are increasingly becoming divorced from the centres themselves.

Around 64 per cent of call centres now have a strategy in place to govern their technology, according to the Merchants Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report from Dimension Data.

"This indicates the increasing important and focus that organisation are placing on IT in contact centres especially given the huge investments that have been made in recent years," the report says.

However, dealing with and developing call centre IT isn't necessarily within the remit of the call centres themselves - it's often left to an organisation's general management to deal with.

Cara Diemont, Dimension Data's marketing director of customer interactive solutions, said: "Very often, the technology component [of a call centre budget] is not carried by the call centre, it's carried by a broader operational IT budget."

Despite the new-found realisation of the value of IT, call centres are by no means rushing to get their wallets out, with static budgets meaning every pound spent on technology has to be justified.

Two-thirds of businesses now expect to see a solid business case or ROI to be presented before a technology purchase will get the go-ahead.

However, the pre-purchase cautiousness is a sharp contrast to the post-implementation attitudes.

Nearly two-thirds of organisations don't track how new technology measures up against its projected ROI and results, while only 24 per cent of centres are able to measure the financial and business benefits of their new buys.

According to the report, the year ahead will see most call centres trying to squeeze a little extra from the technology they already have.

For that reason, the report predicts, workforce optimisation technology will be a key purchase for many call centres.

Paul Scott, director of business development for customer interactive solutions at Dimension Data, said: "Workforce optimisation is the new hot button."