Contact centres must up service delivery, or risk obsolescence, a report reveals.
Dimension Data released its tenth annual Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report on Friday. Polling 403 contact centres, worldwide, the report aims to provide an overview of trends and performance data in the global contact centre market.
This year's report reveals some startling results, says Dimension Data's business solutions architect for customer interactive solutions, Siva Pather.
The report found that, while customer satisfaction is today ranked highly among all centres as part of development strategies (87%), 30% of centres say having a single view of the customer is not applicable. Further, only 24.3% of call centres consider improving customer service to be a top strategic driver.
According to the report's editor, Cara Diemont: "Customer satisfaction scores have dropped across contact centres in all regions. While this may seem a negative indicator of contact centre performance, we believe it is a more accurate reflection of actual customer satisfaction levels than the previous high scores reported."
Diemont further notes there is a strong customer focus across all centres in all regions, and that: "Improving service delivery and customer experience continues to be a focus with many initiatives across different functions being put in place."
Previous years' reports showed customer service ranked low on priority lists, after cost reduction and improved productivity/efficiency, says Pather.
Global contact centre expert Simon Rancoroni, speaking at the launch, warned consumers are moving faster than the contact centre community. He noted the number of channels available to consumers makes it difficult to track how they are interacting with an organisation, and as a result, it is difficult to predict staffing, resourcing and budgeting needs.
Diemont echoes this in her executive summary, stating: "There are continued advances in and proliferation of different devices and modes of communication, both of which are impacting consumer and end-user behaviour. One gets the sense that consumers are 'waiting' for the organisations they do business with to 'catch up with them'."
As Rancoroni notes, the call centre and company's Web presence are often run completely separately. However, as far as the customer is concerned, both are a channel into the company and should provide the same level of service.
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