Customer contact is always evolving. New channels such as chat and social media, alongside phone and email, drive new trends every day. Increasingly, companies are opting to outsource their customer contact to call centres. Businesses notice that good customer service leads to better customer satisfaction, increased revenue, and an enhanced brand reputation.
The Netherlands in the top 10
The Customer Interaction Research Centre discusses several facts about call centres in the Netherlands. It's notable that call centres are large in scale on the global stage. There are call centres with over 20,000 employees. For comparison, the largest contact centre in the Netherlands has slightly more than 2,500 seats. The average number of seats in Dutch contact centres ranges between 30 and 80. Yet, the Netherlands ranks in the top 10 of European contact centre markets with a share of 6.8 percent and a stable number of 184,000 workplaces. This is according to the Contact Centre Benchmark.
The average call centre employee is a 37-year-old woman
In the Netherlands, 2.6 percent of the workforce is employed at a contact centre. Furthermore, it turns out almost two-thirds (65%) of the employees are women and the average age of a contact centre employee is 37 years. There's a visible trend in recent years: more companies are choosing to outsource their customer contact to an external contact centre. The three sectors where contact centres are most frequently utilised are services and administration (27%), finance and insurance (19%), and information and communication (17%).
In-house or outsourcing
71% of organisations manage all contacts in-house.
21% use a combination of handling it themselves and outsourcing.
8% of organisations outsource the majority (75%) to external parties.
Which sectors are doing well?
To assess which sectors are performing best in terms of customer service, customer satisfaction with the telephone service provided was examined. Although commercial companies acknowledge that customer service is important for their brand reputation, it is the non-profit organisations that achieve the best customer satisfaction results. The top three sectors consist of healthcare support, education/childcare, and energy and telecom. One exception: the government performs the lowest in customer satisfaction with telephone service. The fact that the retail and trade sector is also among the three poorest performing sectors indicates that there is much to gain for commercial businesses in telephone customer services. Could it be that these companies recognise the impact of customer service on repeat purchases and brand loyalty but still see customer service as a cost in practice? Overall, it appears that more and more companies are measuring how much effort a customer must exert to resolve a problem. There are opportunities, especially for commercial entities as well as the government/public sector, to achieve gains. Recent developments are promising: 62% of companies report an increase in the NPS score in 2016.
Various channels
In recent years, consumers have been able to use a wider variety of channels to contact companies. Contact centres are embracing this development. Where contact centres were often labelled as 'call centres' in the past, we have been talking about multi-channel organisations for several years now, where channels can be deployed as desired. More often there are opportunities in the areas of chat and email. For consumers, chat is the ideal solution when looking for a quick and often concise answer. Despite the growing availability of customer contact centres, telephone contact remains an extremely important communication method. Research by TNS NIPO among 42,000 Dutch people shows that the Dutch consumer is critical of fully digital-oriented customer services. An interesting detail?…: men view digital customer contact much more positively than women.
