Banking call centers rank second only to those of catalog retailers in customer satisfaction, though more than half of bank customers say they would defect over a bad phone experience, according to a survey to be released today.
The survey of 900 consumers by the consulting firm CFI Group gave banks' call centers high marks overall, compared with four other industries, largely because bank employees were able to resolve customers' questions 80% of the time. However, even if bank call centers outperform those in other industries, some experts said consumers in general still tend to consider call centers a source of frustration rather than satisfaction. Related Link
Sheri Teodoru, a program director and partner at CFI Group in Ann Arbor, Mich., who wrote the study, said that bank call centers "are doing a really good job" but that the stakes are particularly high when customers' questions are not resolved.
"A customer's interaction with a call center has an enormous impact on their likelihood to stay a customer or defect," she said.
Of the 66% of customers who said they had had a bad experience with their bank's call center, 53% said they "will not do business with their bank again."
"That is reason enough to start making contact centers a bigger priority," Ms. Teodoru said, though she emphasized that banking customers are less likely to actually make a switch, even after a bad experience, because of the cost and hassle of doing so.
Eric Roberts, a senior vice president at CitiStreet, the benefits administrator owned by Citigroup Inc. and State Street Corp., said, "First-call resolution is a big topic of discussion right now, and that goes right back to the defection rate."
Bank call centers received an overall score of 77 on a 100-point scale in the survey, which based its methodology on the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index. Banks outperformed cell phone, cable and satellite, insurance, and personal computer firms' call centers.
The survey said that 90% of customers try to solve problems by going to a Web site before contacting a call center so that the questions they ask on the phone tend to be more complex than formerly.
"Most customers are not calling to get an account balance," Mr. Roberts said. "They're asking harder questions like why the interest rate is up on their credit card, or why a specific transaction is on their account. So they are more willing to leave you if you can't answer their question."
Harry Fouke, a senior analyst at Proudfoot Consulting in Atlanta, warned against making too much of bank call centers' strong performance relative to other industries'.
"I don't think any industry is stellar in customer service," he said. "What a customer really wants is often contrary to what a call center is set up to do, which is converting a positive customer experience into getting more products into a customer's hand."
The CFI Group study did not address cross-selling.
It found that customers who believed a call center was sited overseas rated their overall satisfaction 26 points lower than those who believed it was domestic. "It's not offshoring per se that's driving negative perceptions," Ms. Teodoru said. Rather, "poor service quality from offshore contact centers is driving those perceptions."
However, banks had the lowest defection rate among customers who had negative perceptions of offshore call centers, at 20%.
"The main problem with offshoring is that customer service representatives on the other end don't use the product," Mr. Fouke said. "Mostly they go by a script, and the customer gets frustrated quickly."
Anthony Viggiano, an executive vice president at O'Connor & Associates in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., said a bank client of his recently closed a call center in India.
"The cost is not as beneficial as in the past, and the Indian call center posted much lower scores in customer satisfaction," he said. "There are a lot of problems because of the language barrier."
CitiStreet has four call centers — three in the United States, one in Mumbai. Mr. Roberts said he has emphasized the importance of explaining to customers why a question cannot be answered immediately and then following up with a resolution. "A lot of our industry misses the follow-up at times, and that's where we still lack," he said.
Call centers also are trying to fix the "churn-and-burn mentality" that has produced employee turnover rates of 70% or higher, he said. More companies are emphasizing to employees that call centers can be "an entry point for a career path," he said.
