Consumers not happy with contact centres: Avaya

David Swan
Monday, 16 May 2011 23:12

Business IT - Networking

Avaya has published the result of its Contact Centre Consumer Index, and the results aren't good news for contact centres,  with the majority of customers left unimpressed.

The survey was conducted with the aim of finding out what consumers want from their contact centres'¦ and the results essentially read as a failed report card for companies' contact centres.

The study found that 62% of respondents answered that 'interacting with customer service centres is always problematic', whilst 76% disagree with the statement  'I would be happy to interact with a customer service representative who I know is based in a different country'.

iTWire spoke to Chong Win Lee, Avaya's Regional Director of Asia Pacific, who helped to break down the survey results.

He outlined a catch-22 when it comes to contacting customers - text messaging.

'People are happy to receive text messages about certain types of information, but definitely not promotional information,' he said.

'Certain texts can be really annoying for consumers, and this is reflected in the survey results.'

Avaya has undertaken the survey globally this year, in contrast to where it focused exclusively on Australia in the past.

Some results were slightly more heartening. 99% of respondents were contacted by a company via the phone, with 89% of respondents preferring phone contact over all others.

Also, 35% of respondents labeled the courtesy of the customer service representative as 'excellent', which is not a terrible result.

Win was optimistic.

'One of the key findings overall is here's a good opportunity for contact centres to drive an improvement in how customers perceive contact centres,' he said.

'The opportunity is being able to utlize technology, for example being able to identify a customer based on their name, from information from their phone. There's a lot of potential there that's not being tapped.'

'In general, we also see that the phone is going to be the primary channel for a few years to come. A very clear trend we see, however, is that multimedia channels are going to be more prevalent, and will become significant in the Australian/New Zealand market.'

"Companies would be very wise to follow these trends."

These channels include web chat and email, along with video chat like Skype.

Avaya Inc. is a privately held telecommunications company which specializes in enterprise network, telephony, and call center technology, whilst the report itself was sponsored by callcentres.net.