Customers are waiting up to 25% longer before having their calls answered by contact centre agents, according to a new report from Dimension Data, which surveyed over 200 contact centres across the world. The Merchants Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report revealed that the average caller waits 29 seconds to have a call answered, compared to 24 seconds four years ago.
Customers seem to be resigned to receiving a poorer service from call centres, with callers waiting on average 71 seconds before abandoning a call. This average wait increases to 91 seconds in the case of those centres serving the telecommunications sector. Tolerance levels are much lower in industries where customers have a wider choice of providers. The tolerance level for the transport sector is only 31 seconds, with customers choosing a different channel or company once this threshold is reached.
The number of calls answered within 10 seconds by an agent has also decreased. Less than 60% of call centres achieved this widely accepted "best practice" speed-to-answer standard in 2003, a decrease from over 70% in 1999. Customers based in the US fare the worst with only 43% of calls being answered within 10 seconds compared to 70% in Europe, 59% in Africa and 58% in Asia-Pacific.
The "World Wide Wait" is not just confined to phone calls. Customers who choose to contact a company via e-mail face an even longer wait. The report reveals that the average time a business takes to respond to an e-mail enquiry is 22.2 hours compared to a nine-hour wait for a callback to a voicemail message. This prioritisation of telephone communications does not bode well for those multi-channel centres that aim to encourage customers to use less expensive email channels.
Mike Fairon, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Customer Interactive Solutions (CIS) at Dimension Data, comments: "This trend of making customers wait longer in queues is a worrying one, which does nothing to enhance the reputation of the call centre industry. Customers appear to be bearing the brunt of budget restraints and reduced investment. This is a false economy as businesses need to understand the long-term impact of keeping customers waiting is that they run the risk of losing them."
First published in the UK in 1996 by Merchants, European contact centre specialists and a subsidiary of Dimension Data, this year`s edition is the sixth in a series of the industry-renowned benchmarking reports. The report has balanced global and industry representation from over 200 contact centres in 19 countries and five continents, and is an invaluable reference for all contact centre professionals. It provides managers with a set of benchmarks with which to measure their operations against, including contact centre staff salary levels, performance statistics, technology developments, CRM trends and training needs.
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Dimension Data Holdings plc (LSE: DDT) is a leading global technology company. The group provides solutions and services that optimise and manage the performance of IT infrastructures to enable business to build competitive advantage. To achieve this, the group delivers solutions using its proprietary `Application Network` architectural framework and its expertise in networking, application integration and managed services.
Dimension Data, founded in 1983, had revenues of $2.1 billion in 2002 and operates in 30+ countries with over 8 000 employees.
Merchants
Merchants Limited is one of Europe`s leading customer contact solutions companies, providing a full range of innovative managed services to enable the successful generation of customer value in real-time, every time. From communications centres in the UK, Ireland and SA, Merchants manages the outsourced customer contact operations of some of eth world`s best-known and most respected brands. Merchants is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dimension Data Holdings.
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