Call centre service not good enough, claims research

Friday, 26 Jul, 2002 0

The travel industry is “delivering poor telephone customer service” according to a survey by Indigo Call Centres.

The research looked at a total 1000 UK companies across the travel, insurance, retail, sport and banking sectors. It also compared the quality of service provided by automated call handling systems with that provided by live customer service representatives.

According to the research, automated call handling has a significant foothold in UK travel call centres, with the majority of companies surveyed using automated systems to deal with calls (61.5%).

But ranked out of a maximum of 10, the travel sector came in below average for the quality of its call handling – scoring 4.4 and 3.75 for live and automated calls respectively.

The speed of call handling was the slowest overall of the sectors surveyed, with live agents taking significantly longer than automated systems to handle calls.

Indigo Call Centres managing director Steve Wigg commented: “Calls to travel companies are simple in nature, making travel well-suited to automated call handling but technology is not enough.

“It is essential for travel companies to program their automated system with customers’ needs and demands in mind. With systems becoming increasingly sophisticated, particularly with the emergence of natural language voice recognition systems, automation looks likely to bring about a widespread upsurge in customer service standards if properly implemented.”

Key statistics for other industry sectors were:

The banking sector was the biggest user of automation (71.4%), though it proved to be the poorest performer in terms of call handling quality with an average 3.75 score across live and automated (live 2.5, automated 5).

The sports sector scored top marks with an impressive 6.3 score for their automated call handling and 5.2 for live, and automation claiming a 4.5% market share.

The insurance industry scored particularly well for their live agent call handling with an impressive 6.1, though automated call handling did not function as well with a score of 4.2.

The retail sector scored very well for the quality of its automated call handling (53.8% penetration) with 5.6 but was let down by its live agents (3.5), giving the sector as a whole a below average ranking of 4.55.

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