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Most of us have had some not-so-great experiences trying to get an answer or resolve a problem through a customer call center. Whether dealing with your bank to clear up a problem, a cell phone company to change a plan or any number of places that are supposed to troubleshoot, being put in the queue is a fact of life. Sometimes even getting a human is a challenge (I’ve posted on that subject before).

There are about 50,000 call centers in the US alone. And many more thousands offshore. Competition is fierce, and a single bad experience with a company in any channel can lead to defection from a company. And rarely do defectors leave quietly. They tend to tell friends. They blog. They make themselves heard. Which is easier today than ever.

The fact is that a customer call center is a critical point of engagement for customers. It can make or break a relationship. Most companies know intuitively how important their call center interactions are, but they aren’t sure what the satisfaction drivers are.

Today an article regarding a new study by CFI Group on call center performance indices caught my eye because it gets at some of the key drivers that cause either pleasure or pain and ultimately determine satisfaction levels. CFI studied six industries: Banking, Cable and Satellite TV, Catalog Retail, Cellular Phone Service, Insurance, Personal Computer and reported on how they did and what factors drive satisfaction.

Here’s a few points I found interesting in the study:

• The most crucial factor contributing to satisfaction, loyalty, retention, and positive word-of mouth is not about how well you were treated during the call, but whether or not the CSR is able to resolve the caller’s issue. Unfortunately, 18% of customers do not have their issue resolved. The importance of this one factor is astounding. Customers who resolve their issue have satisfaction scores 46 points higher than those who do not. Furthermore, those who do not have their issue resolved are eight times more likely to defect.
• On average, about two-fifths (38%) of the respondents say they tried to reach the company first through a means other than the call center. Eighty-five percent of callers who try another method first try the company’s website, which fails to meet their needs, forcing them to try another channel to resolve their issue.
• Call center executives need to take a hard look at their training and monitoring programs to make sure that CSRs have the tools they need to answer the questions they are getting. And the bar is only getting higher as customers migrate to the web. If the “easy” questions are answered on the web, it leaves the more difficult issues for the CSRs to tackle.
• Not every issue can be addressed via the web, and one of the clear takeaways from this research is that improving the quality of the online channel could defer hundreds of thousands of unnecessary calls from the costly contact center channel. Contact centers help with resolving issues that can’t be resolved on the web. They should serve as a continuous feedback loop to the web operation. There can an should be processes in place to make enhancements to the website based on what the CSRs in the call center hear.