Subtle disconnect - call centres still failing us

Call centres still aren't dealing with customers well enough - even those in charge of them admit as much.

Interviews with 170 senior executives in charge of the facilities - broadly referred to now as contact centres given the integration of voice calls, the web and email - shows 70 per cent consider the state of multi-channel customer service 'poor' or 'average'.

The research was carried out by Teleconomy on behalf of Cable and Wireless and Vertex and follows results a month ago showing the adverse impact a bad customer experience via a contact centre can have on a business and its brand.

Trevor Richer, director of business development at C&W's customer interaction management unit, said: "The biggest point to take away is that customer expectation must be in line with the brand."

The survey found companies must match appropriate technologies to services they are providing and - arguably more importantly - there must be no organisational disconnect between different departments and proper measuring of services.

The classic example of organisational disconnect is when a marketing department and those in charge of a brand don't communicate properly with a call centre.

"In more than one case the only contact between marketing and call centre was when the marketing department announced they had sent out a mailing to 10 million customers and to expect a few calls the following Monday," Richer said.

However, there is just as large a gap between how an organisation measures and judges its call centre and how customers perceive it. Consultants in this field have long criticised some facilities for counting, typically, how many calls last less than a minute, for example. Such a metric does little to account for the customer who calls up three times, dissatisfied with their first two, brief experiences.

The hard part is measuring customer satisfaction. Paul Hudson from Teleconomy said: "Businesses will not see a return on investments unless they focus their knowledge of customers to close the gap between what the customer expects and what the business aims to deliver."

Low budget airlines, for example, while they aren't known for exemplary over-the-phone customer care, do satisfy customer expectations.

The research found 10 per cent of contact centres still don't use any metrics to measure performance and that email interactions rank as the most unsatisfactory for consumers.

As for those organisations that do well with customer contact, the financial sector came out top with American Express topping the widely praised operations of virtual bank First Direct.