It seems contact centres are more likely to annoy consumers than help them. Nearly six out of 10 callers hang up after being put on hold for long periods, as operators scramble for personal details or chase the answer to a query, according to recent research by document management firm Macro 4.
Experts believe companies are not taking advantage of technology to build a single, real-time view of consumers to enhance their brand rather than damage it.
'The trouble is that contact centre managers are failing to take advantage of technology,' said Lynda Kershaw, group solutions marketing manager at Macro 4. 'Companies just do not realise that they can give their operators access to more information if they use the right systems.'
The survey's figures make grim reading: 32 percent of the 1,000 consumers polled said they had been kept on hold too long, while 13 percent said they were fed up with being transferred between departments. Another survey revealed that 80 percent of contact centres did not have immediate access to customer account details, and were forced to retrieve the data from the back office to post out subsequently.
Martha Bennett, vice president of research for Europe at analyst firm Giga, said a significant problem was that operators were likely to palm off consumers onto other departments if they did not have the relevant information to hand.
'This is infuriating for the consumer, as they are often expected to repeat all their details because operators do not have access to the appropriate information. These kinds of synchronisation issues frequently go unchecked in contact centres.'
She argued that even when a consumer has already contacted a centre by email, it is unlikely this information will actually appear on the operator's screen. 'Companies have to embrace these multimedia platforms and ensure they are properly synchronised and integrated,' Bennett said.
David Burns, chief technology officer of knowledge management specialist KMS, said the current standards of contact-centre service were shameful.
'You have to question what prompts the majority of these firms to deploy contact centres in the first place,' he said. 'You have to conclude that most of them are driven by their own needs rather than by those of their customers. There is no excuse for this situation, with the technology available today.'
KMS events manager Anwar Ali said his firm's call-centre software let operators type in consumer queries in their own words, triggering the search of an all-encompassing knowledge base.
'Operators should be able to type in the customer's question in their own words and expect to receive a response,' said Ali. 'Our software will break the question down [using] algorithms, eliciting a response with a percentage-based confidence rating.'
Ali said this kind of system also had the advantage of being able to learn from experience. 'At the end of the process, the system will ask the operator whether the proposed solution answered the query. If the answer is yes it makes a neural match, so that next time a similar response to a similar question will gain a higher confidence rating,' he explained.
Most firms make the bulk of their profits from a small percentage of their customers, and the Macro 4 research suggests those with the greatest amount of disposable income are the first to hang up.
Tom Black, chief executive of customer relationship management consultancy Detica, said poor contact centres were those designed with the goals of the enterprise rather than the consumer in mind.
'It is important that firms assess the customer experience by setting up a user group, to see things from the point of view of the customer. It should be remembered that the majority of customers are not technically-minded. You think you might be doing well, but this is a method of finding out how end-users really feel.'
Black advocated that all information on a customer should be stored and made available to whoever needs it. 'This includes information on customers' purchasing history with the company, details of their last transaction and records of all previous telephone conversations and emails.
