Report: Call centers no better at satisfying customers

Despite increasing emphasis on providing better service, contact centers appear to be doing a worse job of satisfying customers, according to a call center report published Monday.

Satisfaction rates in contact centers took a nosedive in 2006, falling from 82% a year earlier to 68% last year, according to the Global Contact Center Benchmarking Report. IT services consultant Dimension Data prepared the report, which surveyed 403 contact centers in 42 countries about the latest industry trends.

Participants reported lower customer satisfaction rates and at the same time confirmed that customer satisfaction is the principal driver of call center development strategies. It ranked first among development strategies in importance, according to 87.3% of respondents. Quality and process improvements placed second in the rankings, cited by 80.7% of respondents.

The situation may not be as dire as the plummeting customer satisfaction numbers suggest, however. “While the decline in customer satisfaction scores this year is not positive, we believe this is because contact centers are more accurately measuring and reporting customer satisfaction through a more balanced approach,” wrote Cara Diemont, editor of Dimension Data’s benchmarking report.

Other findings in this year’s survey include an increasing use of personalization techniques to differentiate among customers and prospects. Some 42.8% of contact centers say they are delivering a personalized and segmented service, compared with 28.3% last year.

While contact centers are getting better are providing more personalized service, however, there is plenty of room for improvement in terms of customer and account visibility: Just 36% of organizations have a single view of the customer across the multiple channels -- such as telephone, e-mail, SMS or text messaging, and online self-service -- they offer.

On the budget front, staff costs continue to eat up the lion’s share of contact center operational budgets, ranging from 64% to 74% of total operational spending, Dimension Data reports. Meanwhile, the average percentage of the budget spent on technology is just 8.6%, with a high of 9.8% in the Asia-Pacific region and a low of 6.5% in North America.

Technology spending is focused on a few key areas, including IP infrastructure and convergence strategies. More than 60% of contact centers have introduced IP-based or hybrid PBX/ACDs, up from 50% last year, for example.

The number of contact centers with the ability to perform networked automatic call distribution (ACD) has increased threefold from 21% in the 2006 report to 60.3% this year. Just over 40% of respondents are using technologies to transfer calls across sites, and 28% have implemented universal queues.

Voice-driven self-service technologies are receiving particular focus, Dimension Data reports. According to respondents, 24.7% plan to install speech recognition systems; 18.6% plan to introduce text-to-speech technologies; and 12.5% intend to implement voice authentication/verification systems.