Unsurprisingly the current trend of outsourcing to Asia has led to the customers….
The UK institute of Customer Service has just released its bi-annual review of how Customer Service in Britain in faring. For this part of this report, they asked respondents their views on Call Centres. You can read the full blog post here, where they have attempted to qualify the top 3 annoyances (presented below).
Unsurprisingly the current trend of outsourcing to Asia has led to the customers complaining about Dealing with staff outside the UK (17.5%). Despite organisations sending their staff on extensive language and cultural training, do UK consumers still find the difference too much to bear? Or is that they perceive the call centre to be based too far away to understand their problems. Or the perception that an off-shore call centre presents – a cost-cutting strategy by an organisation where profit margins are prioritised above the Customer Experience?
Explaining yourself multiple times to different members of staff (16.2%) and Unfriendly staff (18.9%) were also frequently selected by respondents. These are basics of delivering a Customer Experience, not necessarily even delivering a great Customer Experience. Given call centres are such a great potential opportunity to surprise, please and actually interact with your Customers, why do so many companies get it wrong? Too many organisations appear to be concerned with call centre costs than customer retention.
A summary of the latest (January 2010) UKCSI results is available from the UKCSI website.
By Colin Shaw | Published: March 2, 2010