March 2008
Research commissioned by Oracle, which surveyed 1,500 consumers and 250 contact centre managers across Europe, reveals a huge gap between consumers' expectations of customer service and the way businesses are equipped to meet them. The findings reveal that ineffective information systems play a central role in the poor levels of customer service received by the European public.
Key findings include:
* Despite almost unanimous acknowledgement of the importance of keeping customers happy, more than half of European consumers do not judge customer service operations to be effective
* Customers' principal complaints include enduring long call queues, having to continually repeat their queries to different members of staff, and receiving inconsistent answers
* More than half of businesses have no plans to introduce a self-service portal despite a clear preference among customers for using the internet to resolve queries
* Contact centre managers view better quality of information and staff training as the two prime requirements for improving customer service
* Consumers believe that financial services companies offer the best customer service, and telecommunications companies the worst
Loic le Guisquet, senior vice president, Oracle CRM, EMEA, commented on the findings: "The research show us that the majority of European customer service operations are failing to keep pace with the demands of today's consumers. Businesses need to go beyond the simple retention of customer information, and start to apply intelligence to the vast amounts of data they hold in order to meet the public's expectations. Turning information on customer behaviour and their life events into actionable intelligence enables the business to sense and respond to their needs. Systems need to be flexible and draw information from across the business to empower staff in their dealings with customers and their decision making."
The research questioned 1,500 consumers and 250 contact centre managers in the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden and Denmark.
More details on the findings follow in four sections:
* Contact centres failing to meet customer expectations
* Staff let down by inadequate tools, training and processes
* Failure to exploit customer desire for self-service
* Financial services come out on top with telcos bottom
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