Poor technology and the link to poor customer experience

A whitepaper from the Customer experience Foundation and commissioned by Empirix has been developed based on the survey Poor Technology – Poor Experience highlighting the impact of poor technology in contact centres.

The survey was conducted in four countries who are major users of contact centres – UK, USA, France and Germany – to give a global representation of the findings. Within the survey, three different groups of people were interviewed – consumers as well as contact centre and IT professionals. These groups highlighted how different issues are perceived differently by the groups. In all, 5140 people responded of which 3925 were consumers.

The findings were dominated by the impact of poor voice quality. While the greater use of mobile telephone and VoIP at home had an impact, the move by many enterprises to VoIP was highly significant. Unlike traditional TDM telephone networks that have dedicated telephone lines, VoIP networks share their resources across the enterprise including both voice and data. Since this topic has not been a significant issue in the past, it can only be assumed that VoIP networks are a significant cause.

Key consumer perception findings were:

• 79% of consumers globally reported experiencing poor voice quality.
• Consumers said that 42% of all contact centre calls are impacted.
• 68% of consumers will hang up if they experience poor voice quality. For those calling about a new product or service, they will likely call a competing company instead.
• 26% of consumers say they need to redial to complete a transaction.
• “Stress” is the most commonly used word when consumers were asked to explain how they felt after a poor voice quality call.
• Poor voice quality (VQ) is the second most common bad experience for consumers after an interaction with an interactive voice response (IVR) system.
• Case studies show that consumers are often forced to repeat themselves on calls as a result of poor voice quality.

Key contact centre professional’s perceptions were:

• Poor VQ takes up 34% of the value of each call across the US and UK
• UK – If consumers’ perception is correct then national loss (agent costs) is £7.6b
• USA – If consumers’ perception is correct then national loss (agent costs) is $36.8b
• Only 1 in 6 organisations have appropriate tools to monitor poor VQ issues or plan to install them over the next 12 months.

The report concludes that  poor voice quality has now reached epidemic proportions due to a series of factors some of which are within the control of contact centre operators. Given the increasing importance of live conversations between agents and consumers, poor voice quality can impact the ROI in contact centres significantly. Indeed, it is simple to say that a lot of valuable time it wasted by saying, “Could you repeat that please?” More than eight in ten of organisations do not have adequate tools to monitor and manage this issue and it is a clear opportunity to reduce cost.