Call centre service not good enough, claims research
The travel industry is “delivering poor telephone customer service” according to a survey by Indigo Call Centres.
The research looked at a total 1000 UK companies across the travel, insurance, retail, sport and banking sectors. It also compared the quality of service provided by automated call handling systems with that provided by live customer service representatives.
According to the research, automated call handling has a significant foothold in UK travel call centres, with the majority of companies surveyed using automated systems to deal with calls (61.5%).
But ranked out of a maximum of 10, the travel sector came in below average for the quality of its call handling – scoring 4.4 and 3.75 for live and automated calls respectively.
The speed of call handling was the slowest overall of the sectors surveyed, with live agents taking significantly longer than automated systems to handle calls.
Indigo Call Centres managing director Steve Wigg commented: “Calls to travel companies are simple in nature, making travel well-suited to automated call handling but technology is not enough.
“It is essential for travel companies to program their automated system with customers’ needs and demands in mind. With systems becoming increasingly sophisticated, particularly with the emergence of natural language voice recognition systems, automation looks likely to bring about a widespread upsurge in customer service standards if properly implemented.”
Key statistics for other industry sectors were:
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