UK Call Centers Letting Their Customers Down

According to a new research commissioned by Oracle, customers in the UK face the brunt of inadequate services from call centers. The exhaustive study carried out across Europe surveyed 1500 customers and 250 contact centers. The results showed that there was a substantial disconnect between contact center performance and customer expectations. The discontent of British customers was the most telling in Europe where more than 50% of the customers are unhappy with the service levels.

Financial services scored high for customer satisfaction and telecom companies fared poorly as far as call center performance was concerned. The most common grievances were the usual ones such as long call queues, having to interact with multiple staff members, and inconsistent communication from the call center employees. This, when call center managers profess to having customer satisfaction as their number one concern. Apparently there is a disconnect between the thoughts and actions of the call center executives.

The call center customer service was rated just average or outright ineffective by most of the respondents. The call centers on their part stated that the staff was poorly equipped in terms of training and tools. Top factors that call centers said they would like to work on included better information for the staff, better training procedures, distributed decision making capabilities, and keeping the caller interested while on hold.

The report goes on to mention that call centers are surprisingly loath to explore the internet as an option for extending customer service inspite of customers expressing a strong inclination for the internet as a medium for communicating with businesses. Hardly any of the call centers reviewed had any plans of introducing self-service customer portals online to reduce the workload of their contact center employees.

Tags: Contact Centers, Oracle