March 2013
Featured in this insight: IT & telecommunications
Poll finds consumers fed up with shabby customer service call centres: A new poll of 1,000 consumers in the US and UK on behalf of BT and Avaya has revealed that people are increasingly put off by poor service from call centres.
In total, as many as 70% of the respondents believe they often know more than the customer care agent dealing with their inquiry, 80% found agents struggle to answer their questions and 85% reported being put on hold because agents didn’t have the information they needed.
Other contact centre bugbears are that 93% complain organisations don’t phone them back when they say they will, while 54% claimed that the music and messages while on hold often don’t provide a good impression of the company they’re calling.
These statistics bode badly for companies, since 78% of the surveyants also claimed they would only buy from businesses that make it easy for them to deal with and a third believe convenience is more important than price. Furthermore, nearly half believe that customer loyalty is a thing of the past.
The study also looked at the latest modes of customer service communication used by consumers – despite the growth of alternative contact channels, the phone remains the most popular channel with 77% of people having called an organisation in the six months prior to the survey.
Nevertheless, video conferencing is seeing a dramatic rise, with usage up 100% since similar research was carried out in 2010. Webchat is also on the increase, with 26% of consumers using it to communicate with businesses (up by 36% compared with 2010).
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