UK Consumers Face Christmas Customer Service Crisis
UK -- Press Release: Contact centres will need
home-based resources to meet festive demand
UK consumers are bracing themselves for a long wait and frustration this
Christmas as contact centres struggle to predict and cope with surges in
demand and increased staff absence in the run up to 25 December.
Consequently interaction management software provider Exony recommends
increased use of home and outsourced resources to keep customer service
levels high at the busiest time of the year, and to deal with product
enquiries after the festive period.
Contact centres represent the frontline for the majority of brands, and are
the first point of contact for customers. With consumer spending expected to
top 2006's £16.9 billion (Source: Deloitte) meeting Christmas customer
service demand is critical for all sectors, particularly retail, where over
40 per cent of annual turnover occurs in a matter of weeks. Customers are
increasingly voting with their wallets when faced with poor customer
service, with 76 per cent of consumers recently stating that they would stop
doing business with an organisation following a bad experience (Source:
RightNow/Harris Interactive). The festive season is one of the busiest times
for contact centres in terms of call volumes, and high levels of staff
absenteeism ensures that it is one of the most challenging, Exony warns.
To help cope with demand and ensure consistently high-levels of customer
service are delivered, contact centre managers need to increasingly look at
using home-based workers and outsourced resources. Home-based contact centre
agents are an additional resource that can be pulled into assist with
operations as required in real-time, operating as part of a Virtual Contact
Centre (VCC). The number of home-based agents is a trend that has gained
significant momentum in 2007, and is expected to continue growing each year
by 36.4 per cent until 2012 (Source: Datamonitor).
"Competition is so intense today that consumers rightly demand world-class
customer service. To meet these high expectations, companies wanting to
build repeat custom cannot deliver anything less than exceptional service,"
said Rex Dorricott, CEO and co-founder of Exony. "Christmas is the busiest
time of the year for retailers, so to prevent lost business it is vital that
contact centre managers have the flexibility to bring in extra resources to
meet changing demand. If companies want to excel then they must look beyond
the walls of the traditional contact centre. Only then can they avoid
turning their brand into a turkey."
Virtual Contact Centres allow operational and business managers to balance
agent skills with current and future customer demand across the whole
organisation. They enable a company to incorporate agents from multiple
sources, such as home and back office workers, third party outsourced agents
and staff in other geographical areas.
Exony's white paper, "Virtual Contact Centres and Homeshoring: Driving the
Benefits Home", can be downloaded from
http://www.exony.com.