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Call Centre Complaints Survey 2006
Nick Gibson
Channel News
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A new international survey of consumers about their experience with call centres reveals that the British get more cross about customer agents with hard-to-understand accents than being put on hold for up to 10 minutes when they contact a call centre with a problem or query. Conducted for NetReflector, a provider of enterprise feedback solutions, the research explored the customer experience of contacting call centres in nine countries around the world.
Overall, the Brazilians appeared to be the top complainers with 83% of the respondents claiming to have made a complaint in the last six months. They were followed by the British, who surprisingly were ahead of the USA (5th), French (6th) and Germans (7th). The Chinese appear to be the least likely complainants with only 37% saying that they had complained.
When asked what frustrates them most about call centres, UK respondents said bad accents (27%) were their top complaint, followed by being made to wait too long on the line (21%). Other English-speaking countries – Australia, Canada and USA – agreed with UK respondents on this issue – perhaps, highlighting consumer resistance to how customer support functions have been outsourced to off-shore providers in such countries as India or the Philippines.
Difficult-to-understand customer agents seem to cause greater offence than long waiting times to get through to the agent in the first place. Over half of the UK respondents (53%) said they were ready to wait up to 10 minutes, for example.
Customers in non-English-speaking markets rated other issues as more problematic. For example, for the French and the Germans, waiting on the phone was the prime problem, whilst the leading frustration for the Chinese and the Russian respondents was that call centre staff were condescending or rude.
Regardless of some national sensitivity to bad accents, the survey suggests the solution for improving the customer call centre experience is to keep the experience as short as possible. Across all countries, the most important ways to satisfy customers in a service interaction is to ensure they speak with knowledgeable service agents who resolve the customer's problem in one interaction. Less important elements to ensure satisfaction with customer service revolves around the service agent’s interpersonal skills. .
Commenting on the research, Professor Merlin Stone, Visiting Professor at Brunel University, London, and an expert on customer service for change management consultants WCL, said: “This research confirms my worst fears – that far too many companies have focused on cutting costs, even if it makes the customer experience worse. No wonder that the best thing for them to do is to keep the (bad) experience short. But there is another way - provide the customer with better service, retain them for the longer term, and sell them more, while controlling costs by encouraging them to increasingly use self-service, on the Web or through Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR). That’s what the best companies are already doing.”
Adrian Cubitt from NetReflector’s Enterprise Solutions Group said: “It’s not surprising that customer attitudes towards call centres vary between the diverse nationalities polled. However, it is striking that English-speaking customers are sensitive to how their customer service is being handled overseas, regardless of whether the actual quality of service is the same or even better in practice. Bottom line is: when a company goes for off-shore call centre outsourcing to cut operational costs, it should ideally start measuring the impact of this decision on its customer satisfaction ratings right away to validate such a strategic move”.
