Research into Call Centre Customer Confusion

Discussion

Following from the results obtained from the survey, most participants had used the call centre service within the past six months and the perceived confusion level by customers was relatively high. Evidently, this research reinforces the fact that consumer confusion still exists within the call centre service.

The first factor which influences customer confusion was identified as gender. The majority of the participants in the research were females, however it was also found that there was a higher involvement of male staff working at call centres. This supports the literature review as research suggests that female customers tend to ask more questions during the centre call service than males. It can be detected that this was because males cannot communicate effectively with females. An approach that can be taken to reduce this aspect of customer confusion is to employ more female staff in call centres. Furthermore, before customer service is provided to the customer, the call centre should provide the option to the customer of being attended by a female or male staff, according to their preference.

Another substantial cause of customer confusion was language barriers. This is an issue which reinforces the theory suggested by Robison et al 2006. His theory suggests that outsourcing to other countries influences the structure, quality, outcomes and satisfaction in call centres. From our research we found that the majority of customer confusion was caused due to accent and pronunciation issues, due to outsourcing calls abroad. However, our results could not support the effect on outsourcing calls abroad has on the structure of call centres.

For participants, the majority of assistance within call centre was non-native English speakers. However it does not indicate that the culture or background that an assistant possesses influences the quality of customer service provided. This point is limited by the context of this research as it is solely based in the UK. By the fact stated in the literature review, English call centre providers tend to outsource calls to other countries most commonly, India. The culture between the UK and India is similar; however there is a significant difference between some countries, such as China, and the UK. Today, more foreigners are coming to the UK which results in a wider variety of customers using call centres. This can explain the continuation of customer confusion in the UK. Accordingly, organisations may need to provide training to assistants relating to cultural differences, especially if some customers from certain countries formulate a considerable portion of their customer basis.

Technical issues were also identified from the research carried out which organisations can effectively tackle. The first issue identified was the incompetency of the assistant, such as the lack of expertise about the service or product the company provides. Thus, the company should provide and emphasise the knowledge regarding the product or service they offer sufficiently. Furthermore, the lack of communication between the call centre and other department within the business was identified as the third vital cause of customer confusion. Frequently, customers raise questions that cannot be answered by the knowledge of a certain department. This results in customers experiencing another step, dialling another number for instance, in the call centre process which irritates customers with consumer confusion. To address this issue, a communication system must be established amongst departments, to actively connect customers to the appropriate department who can resolve their problems accurately. Additionally, another technical problem within call centres is call background noise that organisations must remove enhance the quality provided by the call centre. As written in the literature review, customers may prefer to help themselves when they wish to solve the confusion they have, which was also found in the survey that customers tend to try to browse the organisation's official website to see if they can solve the problem without a call to avoid the potential confusions that might be caused during the call centre service. Airline industry as an example, was the sole industry which the participants in the survey did not use call centre for. Certainly there are distinct natures among various industries, but the well-organised and informative Airline industry's web-enabled call centre service can be an inspiration for other industries. Manage the firm's website used to interact with customers more effectively with more benchmark of information, better structure and clearer guide. Moreover, the organisation can transform the traditional calling conversation into online chat by typing or video calling.

Ethical issues were also highlighted as a source of consumer confusion. The spam calls which customers receive irritate them and cause their customer confusion. Therefore organisations need to be more concerned with ethical issues that may cause customer confusion and impact on their organisational reputation.

The last limitation found relates to the human resource management in the call centres, the assistant's attitude and behaviour particularly such as the behaviour mentioned by a participant in the research, "launching into their script without any introductions". Therefore additional training should be stressed regarding the courtesy of caller conversations.