Sort out your call centres – and customers will pay you for it

Businesses with call centres – the customer service everyone loves to hate – could well be missing a trick when it comes to squeezing an extra few pence out of their customers. A survey published today reveals that the overwhelming majority of consumers would be happy to pay companies more little more if they knew they'd get better customer service.

Seventy-six per cent of those questioned by knowledge management company Transversal said that they would pay extra for better customer service, while over half said that bad call centre experiences had made them think badly of the company involved.

Granted, the good customer service = good business equation isn't exactly the most complex logic, but the fact that customers' opinions of call centres doesn't appear to be changing shows that the message still isn't getting through.

Dee Roche of Transversal said that despite call centres trying to move away from their "sweatshop image", there was little year-on-year improvement in attitudes. "Customer services is always high on the agenda in the boardroom...but there seems to be a disconnect between what the CEO sees and what's actually happening."

Topping the worst offenders list were financial services. Roche speculated that because consumers very rarely change whom they hold accounts with - unlike other industries with a more fickle customer base - banks and building societies aren't under the same obligation to provide top-drawer customer service in order to retain customers.

While standards may not be improving due to ever-increasing cost pressures – handling greater volumes of calls without the budget to hire more agents – consumers are still asking for their queries to be answered quickly and accurately, with the phone remaining the favourite way to get in contact with a company. Eighty-three per cent of those asked said it was good to talk.

Roche added that the humble website still had a lot of potential for improving customer service. "It's a fallacy that automation is there to deflect customers away from talking to agents. If I've chosen the web, that's how I want to communicate with the company. There's not enough being done to turn the web into a useful service channel," she said.