Financial Services Call Centres still leave most cutomers unhappy

An interesting little article here on the CCF site summarising some findings from Maritz Research.

It seems that less than half (45 per cent) of Financial Services customers questioned in a recent survey felt that their concerns were being respectfully addressed by call centre agents, and only 31 per cent were satisfied with the way their queries are handled.

Other findings included:

• Less than every second customer (41 per cent) feels the adviser has given the customer the required time to address their queries.
• Only 44 per cent of those questioned felt they had been supplied with the appropriate information.

Maritz also has some interesting research on bank's cross-selling abilities. The research suggests that banks miss a lot of cross-selling opportunities, but I'm not sure that this is a bad thing. There is little point increasing the frequency of selling if the timing is wrong for customers and it just irritates them. Interestingly, banks (61 percent) tend to do a better job than credit card companies (49 percent) when it comes to customers satisfied with the call center experience. Perhaps that is also due to the nature of the transaction - few people phone their credit card companies for a happy discussion, while people do make balance enquiries and investment queries to their banks.

It's an interesting set of statistics, given that the Financial Services industry is one of the largest users of the contact centre. My suspicion is that while some of this may be agent attrition, more of this poor customer experience may be from the difficulties complex financial institutions have at presenting the contact centre agent with an overview of the customer. Perhaps simplier customer relationships would lead to higher satisfaction....