Back to basics
WITH AN EVER-GROWING demand for better customer service and an increasingly demanding global client base, the call centre industry is going back to basics, says Dimension Data’s latest Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report.
The first wave of call centres in the early to mid-Nineties was all about replacing expensive face-to-face interaction with more convenient, lower cost telephone channels in centralised cost centres. In the next wave call centre managers tried to integrate complex customer relationship management (CRM) systems into their call centres to get a better view of the customer.
However, many of their objectives remained unfulfilled and contact centres are now focusing on improving efficiencies, service levels and cutting costs, the report says.
Kerry Littlewood, account manager for customer interactive solutions at Didata South Africa, says calls centres must still work towards obtaining a single view of their customer if they want to remain competitive over the long term. But their focus seems to have become more short term in order to cope with the hectic daily pressure of trying to resolve the complaints of a global customer base wanting information “right now”.
Now in its 10th year, the research sampled the views of 300 contact centres in 36 countries on five continents. That 20% of the sampled centres were in Britain, 18% in Australia and 17% in SA shows the participants were most heavily weighted to where Didata’s presence is best known.
However, Littlewood says the report is becoming more global in nature and is therefore hopefully painting an increasingly accurate picture of global trends. Clients sometimes refer to the report as the “call centre bible” and use it to benchmark themselves against trends worldwide, she says.
Call centres are increasingly using automated responses to resolve basic complaints and agents to resolve more complex queries. But as seen in previous years, companies are still not improving their response times on email queries.
Finweek
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