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Contact Centres Market Assessment 2010
Key Note Publications Ltd, Feb 2010, Pages: 224
Approximately 307,000 people worked in customer service in the UK in the second quarter of 2009, and another 84,000 worked in call or contact centres. In addition, 96,000 people were managers in customer care, taking total employment in the sector to 487,000, or around one employee in every 50. The overall ratio of one manager to four employees indicates that some organisations are top-heavy with managers.
Staff turnover in contact centres declined in 2008/2009 but remained high at around one employee in five. Salaries for customer-service agents did not rise, and salaries for centre managers fell slightly, but salaries for training managers soared as contact-centre operators focused on training to improve service quality and retain effective employees. In 2009, however, almost four UK contact centres in five engaged more temporary and contract workers. The expansion of temporary staff raises issues such as the problem of providing adequate training for and obtaining excellent performance from people who are engaged for only a short period. Sufficient qualifications, including postgraduate awards, do exist to support a career ladder in customer service. Technology and training together have the potential to offer a viable future for the UK contact-centre and customer-service sector.
Issues of concern to callers to contact centres include staff they cannot understand, automated response menus that are too long or that fail to offer the required option, difficulties in query and complaint resolution, and data theft. For contact-centre organisations, important issues include weighing the risks of infrastructure failure and crime against the cost reductions of offshoring to countries with low labour costs, and calculating the benefits of upgrading their systems against the costs of doing so.
A consumer survey conducted in September 2009 revealed that only two people in 15 can always understand contact-centre staff, while two people in nine can hardly ever understand them. Almost 17 people in 20 waste time in automated response queues, and almost one person in three does not receive a satisfactory response when they telephone an organisation with a complaint. Despite these drawbacks, more than seven people in ten prefer the telephone to any other method of communication.
Issues of poor customer service have come to the fore as multinational companies have grown beyond the capacity of many national governments to regulate their activities. Despite this, the public can still influence corporate activities. For example, their reluctance to accept unsolicited telephone calls has reversed the growth of telemarketing. Customers want contact centres to answer calls rapidly and at any time — issues at least partly resolved by dispersed contact centres and the employment of home-based staff.
Current trends in the contact-centre business include: reverse offshoring; increasing the skill and autonomy of contact-centre staff, so that they can better resolve complex queries; and making greater use of automated response for simple communications. These trends reflect a real concern to improve the service provided to customers.
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