Call Centers' Satisfaction Plummets

Customers are much less satisfied with the service they get from call centers, the 1-800 service you contact when trying to get answers to questions about a product or service, according to a report released today and reported on by ComputerWorld. The satisfaction rate with call centers fell dramatically to 68 percent in 2006 from 82 percent in 2005, according to the Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report. Dimension Data, which conducts the annual survey, attributed the large drop to companies instituting better processes to measure the performance of call centers. In other words, call centers are not doing as good a job as they thought they were.

Call centers in the federal government, particularly at the Social Security Administration, have scored high in satisfaction surveys in the past when compared to private-sector call centers. But more could be done to improve call center performance, concludes the Government Accountability Office.