Survey Studies Global Contact Center Performance

By Susan J. Campbell,
Contributing Editor, Customer Interaction Solutions

Contact centers are an important interaction point between the company and the customer, yet many contact centers still struggle with delivering the level of customer service the customer expects. One of the most effective methods for improving performance is to measure it from the customer’s perspective.

To better gauge how contact centers are doing overall, ICMI’s Global Service Index Report shares the results of a mystery-shopper-based assessment of call center services practices both in the U.S. and abroad. This survey was developed and executed by OmniTouch International.

A recent study of service performance in the telecommunications sector found that the U.S. ranked the highest in overall performance of telecom call centers in seven countries at 64 percent. The UK. followed closely at 63 percent and Indonesia at 60 percent. These rankings are not enough, however, to indicate that customer service levels are where they should be in order to effectively drive business.

One of the first elements of consideration in the survey was the accessibility of customer service agents within the contact centers that were studied. Throughout the world, the average waiting time was 155 seconds across all calls. There appeared to be substantial inter-country variations.

In Australia, there was a substantial difference in the customer experience among those calling the chosen providers. Two providers answered in less than one minute, while two others answered in less than seven minutes. For one provider, the average wait time was a staggering 45 minutes.

China was also greatly skewed in accessibility as the majority of calls occurred in a timely manner of less than two minutes. The surprising aspect was that there was an outlier of calls that had a much longer wait time of eight minutes.

India proved to shine in accessibility as wait times were very short. The majority of contact centers answered in less than 10 seconds and the longest wait came in a three minutes. For Indonesian call centers, the performance was much like those located in India.

Both Singapore and the U.K. proved to perform very well in response times. Agents in Singapore answered calls within 25 seconds, and in the U.K., wait times were less than 50 seconds. The U.S. turned in a less than stellar performance at four minutes or less. One center kept a caller on hold for 16 minutes, while another pushed it to 42.

The collective centers that were studied in this survey operated a wide variety of IVR systems, both push button and speech recognition. The centers also used a variety of approaches to properly routing calls. For those that provided rapid access to agents, the likelihood of a satisfying experience for the customer increases significantly. CiS

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