Survey Studies Global Contact Center Performance: Part III

ICMI’s Global Service Index Report recently revealed the results of a survey developed and executed by OmniTouch International. This survey examined contact centers throughout the global industry to determine accessibility, service quality, engagement and their ability to generate revenue. The survey provided a clear picture of strong performers and those who could stand to do a little more work.

U.K. contact centers proved that while they were lacking in basic courtesy skills, they outperformed others in engaging the customer through more complex social processes. U.K. contact centers ranked 84 percent in overall engagement performance. A distant second place was Singapore, at 68 percent.

For those agents working in U.K. centers, they performed well using the customer’s name during the call as 90 percent were successful in this task. Another 90 percent portrayed attentive interest in the caller and 94 percent delivered solid provision of a solution. The ability to deliver a resolution on the first call was possible with 93 percent of agents.  

An interesting correlation exists between engagement values and fast answering speeds. U.K. contact centers delivered strong engagement skills as well as relatively fast answering speeds, indicating a link between the two to create interaction that is clearly identified and planned.

U.S. call centers came in a distant fourth in engagement performance at 65 percent. These centers performed very poorly at role-model behavior with 45 percent. A common thread with U.S. call center agents was a monotonous, scripted and robotic delivery, with only once exception as one call center performed rather high.

India proved to be the lowest ranking country in engagement performance, earning a low 52 percent. While 82 percent successfully used the customer’s name during the call, other engagement standards proved to be very weak, even with quick answering times.

In the case of Indian telecom centers, 24 percent of the interactions involved callers that commented that agents were not comfortable with English. In 20 percent of the interactions, agents greeted and started the conversations in Hindi, before proceeding in English.

In terms of revenue generation, U.K. telecom call centers performed highest overall in revenue generation performance at 76 percent, followed by U.S. centers at 68 percent.

U.K. centers were consistent in terms of asking customers to sign-up and offering upsell or additional incentive for signing up. The quality of the upsell in U.K. centers showed significant room for improvement as it came in at 65 percent, compare with Singapore at 100 percent, Australia at 91 percent, and the U.S. and China each at 80 percent.

U.S. call centers came in at 68 percent in overall revenue generation performance and only 60 percent in offering the upsell. The quality of the upsell, on the other hand, was much higher at 80 percent. Those agents that were comfortable enough to ask or the upsell tended to be excellent at the quality of their offer.

Those telecom call centers in Indonesia proved to be the worst at revenue generation, coming in at only 6 percent. There were no upsell offers at all and only 13 percent asked the caller for their business. In contrast, the speed of the answer in these call centers is very fast, indicating that these centers are more concerned with controlling costs than generating revenue.