Europe ahead on Internet and call centre integration

Europe is leading the world when it comes to the use of technology in call centres, according to this year's Merchants Group Call Centre Benchmarking report.

The full report is due out in January 2000, but the interim results suggest that Internet technologies are having a huge impact on the industry - with Europe having the highest adoption of technologies such as 'call me' buttons on their Web sites.

Sally Watts, report manager at Merchants Group, believes Europe's lead comes down to the way in which agents interact with the technology. "In Europe, the agent makes better use of customer relationship management software. And in the UK there is a very high calibre of agent and it is a more mature market."

However, enthusiasm for fully integrating Web and call centre communications is slow with the financial industry being the only sector to have customer, and agent, linked Web pages.

Less than a quarter of the respondents see the need for a multi-communications centre - combining email, fax, telephone and Internet. This is despite the marked increase in use of email for inbound and outbound sales with customers. Sixty-one per cent of inbound sales are conducted through email compared with 29 per cent last year.

Watts believes this will force call centres to become more multi-channel focussed. "The emails are coming in and going through to the call centre by default which means the IT departments are having to provide better facilities," she said.

One of the most shocking results of the report was the growth in turnover of staff to 23 per cent a year. With the average agent remaining in a job for only 27 months. Watts also believes there is an increase in the number of missed calls as the consumers are abandoning calls in less time while the answer rate of agents has not increased.

The survey questioned 269 call centres across all industry sectors in 22 countries - the largest report of its kind done by the Merchant Group.