Aiming at improving customer retention at a time when the sluggish pace of the economy will cause lower spending budgets, more and more enterprises are investing in customer relationship management (CRM) and unified desktop solutions.

According to the latest report by independent market analyst Datamonitor, the global market for contact center CRM licenses and services was almost $2 billion in 2007 and investment in the same will continue to grow at a CAGR of 10% through 2013.

As per the report titled ‘CRM in the contact center and the emergence of the unified agent desktop’, unified agent desktops - solutions that provide a complete view of the customer from one application, are expected to thrive.

CRM solutions in the contact center are being deployed to help provide customer services agents with more detailed information on customers and their historical transactions and information. This should help increase first call resolution rates and lead to cost reduction in contact centers. Moreover, enterprises are also keen to improve system usability and reduce agent turnover.

The report also highlights that the use of analytics with CRM is increasing at a brisk rate in contact centers as management are under constant pressure to optimize operations while uncovering trends within aggregated customer data.

In addition, enterprises are using real-time analytics to predict the areas where cross-sell and up-sell opportunities exist. The report also adds that the contact center will become more streamlined with the rest of the enterprise over the next few years as companies look to reassess existing assets and ‘do more with less.’ Towards this end CRM and customer analytics will be important in bringing about this initiative.