Is it all talk when management declares customer satisfaction a priority?

Satisfaction of call centre customers may be going down hill. The Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report 2006 highlighted that contact centres were putting call centre customers first by addressing service levels as a priority. The preliminary findings for the 2007 Benchmarking Report cast doubt on this commitment.

The 2007 report indicates that there has been a significant decrease in the levels of customer satisfaction, regardless of location, with the overall score down to 68.3% from 82% in the previous report.

The highest decrease in satisfaction was in Asia-Pacific where satisfaction fell from 84% to 61.9%, a staggering 22.1%. North America didn’t fare much better with customer satisfaction levels falling 21.1%. In Europe customer satisfaction levels fell 8.6%, with the lowest fall being recorded in Africa and Middle East with a 7.7% decrease in customer satisfaction.

“Although on the face of it the findings may appear negative, strangely there may be some good news. Throughout the contact centre industry there has been a focus on a more mature assessment of customer satisfaction, beyond a one-dimensional approach, to a balanced scorecard. This more realistic measurement approach may be a reason for the large drop in satisfaction scores reported across all geographies,” comments Cara Diemont, editor of Dimension Data’s Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report.

Diemont continues, “More worryingly, the lower levels of satisfaction may be a result of the poor execution of programmes.”

Jason Thals, national solutions manager, customer interactive solutions at Dimension Data in Australia wrote this year’s chapter on Performance Measures and Metrics. Thals observes that whilst tremendous effort is applied to measuring customer satisfaction, and agrees that the method of measurement has improved, contact centres are still largely assessing their performance in operational terms rather than using business metrics. Performance indicators based on volume metrics and durational data continue to dominate reporting across the industry.

“It’s encouraging to see customer satisfaction given such a focus, but we are some way off a more sophisticated measurement of business factors in the contact centre,” says Thals.

Insight, opinion and analysis on the reported worldwide decrease in call centre customer satisfaction levels as well as commentary on other contact centre trends including multi-channel development, the increasing use of self-service and adoption of IP technologies will be available in Dimension Data’s Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report 2007 to be published on 19th March 2007.

-ENDS-

About Dimension Data

Dimension Data plc (LSE:DDT), a specialist IT services and solution provider, helps clients plan, build, support and manage their IT infrastructures. Dimension Data applies its expertise in networking, security, operating environments, storage and contact centre technologies and its unique skills in consulting, integration and managed services to create customised client solutions.

About Dimension Data’s Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report

First published in the UK in 1997 by Merchants, Dimension Data’s specialist contact centre outsourcing and operations division, this year’s edition is the ninth in a series of the industry renowned benchmarking reports. The report has balanced global and industry representation from 403 contact centres located across 39 countries and six continents, and is an invaluable reference for all contact centre professionals. It provides organisations with a set of best practice standards and benchmarks, including staffing and training, performance metrics, technology usage, budgets and development plans. The report is published by Dimension Data. For more information about the Report, please go to www.ccbenchmarking.com.