Call centre survey.

A new international survey of consumers about their experience with call centres reveals that the British get more cross about customer agents with hard-to-understand accents than being put on hold for up to 10 minutes when they contact a call centre with a problem or query.

Conducted for NetReflector, a leading provider of enterprise feedback solutions for major corporates, the research explored the customer experience of contacting call centres in nine countries around the world. Overall, the Brazilians appeared to be the top complainers with 83% of the respondents claiming to have made a complaint in the last six months. They were followed by the British, who surprisingly were ahead of the USA (5th), French (6th) and Germans (7th). The Chinese appear to be the least likely complainants with only 37% saying that they had complained.

When asked what frustrates them most about call centres, UK respondents said bad accents (27%) were their top complaint, followed by being made to wait too long on the line (21%). Other English-speaking countries -Australia, Canada and USA--agreed with UK respondents on this issue -perhaps, highlighting consumer resistance to how customer support functions have been outsourced to off-shore providers in such countries as India or the Philippines.

Difficult-to-understand customer agents seem to cause greater offence than long waiting times to get through to the agent in the first place. Over half of the UK respondents (53%) said they were ready to wait up to 10 minutes, for example.

Customers in non-English-speaking markets rated other issues as more problematic. For example, for the French and the Germans, waiting on the phone was the prime problem, whilst the leading frustration for the Chinese and the Russian respondents was that call centre staff were condescending or rude.

www.netreflector.com