The Customer Contact Association (CCA) is the global professional body for contact centres. It has over 900 member organisations. In the UK, over one-third of the contact centre population is employed by CCA members.

The CCA carries out research into best practice and emerging issues. It also supplies training and other improvement activities to its members. The CCA awards the Global Standard to contact centres that achieve its quality standard.

The CCA introduced the Global Standard in 2001. Since then over 250 contact centres have successfully implemented the standard and received the award following an independent assessment.

The CCA regularly reviews and updates the Global Standard, with version 5 introduced in 2011. The Global Standard's key principles are found in the eight modules of the standard:

• customer focus
• contact centre performance and operational effectiveness
• employee focus: recruitment, selection and retention strategies
• learning, development and employee performance management
• legislation, regulation and policies affecting the organisation
• third party and managed relationships
• security and fraud prevention
• implementing and managing contact centre technology.

Connect retained the accreditation at its annual review in 2012 and will undergo a similar review in 2013. 

The connect contact centre at Adactus registered for the Global Standard in May 2010. Over the next 12 months, the connect team worked on an action plan to improve its performance and arrangements across all eight of the Global Standard's key principles.

In June 2011 connect was assessed against the Global Standard by an accredited auditor. Following agreement of a short action plan - comprising only four improvement points - connect was awarded the standard. This is a fantastic achievement for the connect team coming in under two years from the contact centre's establishment.

Connect will be fully assessed again in 2014, with shorter assessments taking place at 12 month intervals until then.