Mercury Interactive survey finds 69% of UK consumers blame poor service at call centres on failure of IT systems

Mercury Interactive Corporation, the global leader in business technology optimisation, today released the findings of a major survey (conducted by BMRB International) regarding contact centre efficiency. The survey of over one thousand UK consumers highlights customer dissatisfaction at contact centres in the UK.

Key findings include:

* 37 percent of people using contact centres feel they usually get poor service.

* 93 percent of consumers, blame excessively long waiting times for poor service [43 percent claim they were put on hold for up to 10 minutes or longer]

* 69 percent complain of poor customer service from call centres because the IT systems are not working properly

* 56 percent blame dissatisfaction with online contact centres on slow Web sites and system crashes.

The overall finding, that consumers are frustrated at having to wait for long periods of time either online or on the phone, demonstrates that contact centres in the UK are not running efficiently, and are not meeting customer expectations. In some instances consumers (43 percent) have been expected to wait for up to ten minutes or more, and then the average time of the call is another 5 minutes. The main reason given for long waits by contact centre agents was slow IT systems at the contact centre.

"Virtually every company now has some form of customer contact centre, be it online or in a telephone call centre", said Colin Rowland, VP EMEA Mercury Interactive UK. "Contact centres are typically in place in order to process customer enquiries more efficiently, dealing with as many enquiries as possible in the shortest space of time. If IT system are slow, causing long waiting times, this directly impacts the productivity of the contact centre, increasing cost per agent and causing customer dissatisfaction."

56 percent of respondents were unhappy with their experience of using online contact centres claiming that they were too slow or crashed on a regular basis. The survey also revealed that 21 percent of consumers said that the contact centre Web sites were too complicated to use and needed to be simpler to navigate.

"IT systems today are the backbone of customer facing operations, be they online or at a call centre", continued Rowland. "Poorly performing or badly designed Web sites can ruin the customer experience and ultimately cost a company revenue and brand value."

"Clearly the results of this survey underline the fact that IT today is crucial to the smooth running and efficiency of a contact centre. When IT systems fail and the performance of the agent or Web site is impacted, it dramatically hampers the productivity of the contact centre and the customer sees this," said Rowland.

"In an environment where every call is monitored for quality, we would expect the enabling IT to be monitored in the same way. At Mercury Interactive we believe that the industry is changing and will no longer accept this situation. New quality management initiatives will examine the success of the complete business process, including the way an employee is able to perform and the way the supporting technology performs. Business technology optimisation (BTO) is one of the quality initiatives leading the way," he added.

BTO applies quality management principles to IT, enabling enterprises to continuously measure, maximise and manage the quality of IT enabled business processes to produce business results. BTO can be implemented incrementally and produces results in weeks and months, rather than months and years. When implemented in the contact centre, Mercury Interactive`s solution delivers a complete platform for monitoring the performance and availability of Contact Centre applications that support internal business processes as well as external Web self-service interactions - all from a business-centric point of view and it is the only solution specifically designed to measure, manage, and optimise the business impact of IT systems on agent productivity.

The survey revealed that, of the full sample of UK consumers, 26 percent do not have access to the Internet or a computer. The survey also found that the most common reasons for contacting a contact centre was to either enquire about a utility bill, contact a financial institution (telephone/online banking) or contact the mobile phone operator.

This survey was conducted by BMRB on behalf of Mercury Interactive Corporation (NASDAQ: MERQ), the global leader in business technology optimisation.