The main focus for the contact center — no matter industry it is meant to serve — should be the customer. Especially now as every industry is feeling the crunch of the dip in the economy, customer service can be the only thing keeping a customer loyal.

In an effort to raise customer service standards in the call center industry in the U.K., GfK NOP, an independent market research company, conducted a call center benchmarking exercise.

Each call center contacted by GfK NOP researchers was rated using more than 50 criteria across five key areas of service: timeliness, ease of use, reliability, staff knowledge and personalized service.

To complete this exercise, the market research firm made 20,000 mystery shopper calls to the U.K.’s leading call centers across five sectors, including retail, financial services & insurance, telecoms & utilities, public sector and entertainment, leisure & travel. This initiative identified the best performers and attempted to raise the standing of the contact center industry.

The top ten call centers identified for customer service:

The retail and financial services sectors proved to be the strongest performers in terms of customer service, with scores of 87 percent and 86 percent respectively. While First Direct came out the top performer, Denplan and F&C investments were not far behind. Such a close “winners’ circle” is truly encouraging as it demonstrates that there is a strong focus on quality customer service within these companies.

Those call centers operating in the public sector scored 78 percent, four points behind telecoms & utilities and entertainment, leisure & travel sectors, which both scored 82 percent. United Utilities topped the telecoms & utilities sector with a score of 86 percent. Such a performance is surprising as telecoms & utilities are not always known for the customer experience they create.

 

The criteria used in this exercise considered all aspects of customer service, including the time it took to get through to a customer service representative, queue management, automated IVR systems, politeness, knowledge and friendliness of call center staff and how quickly inquiries were resolved.

Overall industry scores: 

The weakest area identified by this study is that of personalized service. The overall score for this element was 68 percent. This lower score could indicate a lack of proper technology within the contact center to be able to personalize information; a lack of contact center initiative to promote personalization; or a lack of interest from the customer base for personalized service.

 

Personalization is still relatively new to the list of demands within the contact center, making it a likely area to find weakness. This study has effectively identified areas for improvement and doing so will only help to improve overall performance for the contact center.