As reported in The Times today, in response to a shareholder’s question at BT’s AGM, Chief Executive Ian Livingston announced that BT is moving 2,000 call centre jobs back from India to the UK. This apparently resulted in a huge round of applause perhaps reflecting the UK consumers’ hatred of the offshore call centre.
The move is probably more about the UK economy and minimising redundancies than improving BT’s customer service but it is a great step forward.
Readers may recall that Surveylab conducts the UK Customer Care study and last year reported specifically on the total dissatisfaction UK consumers have towards offshore call centres. At that time we reported that 66% of our respondents reckoned their call to a UK company ended up overseas but they were far from happy with the experience:
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68% of consumers had seen customer care deteriorate since call centre operations moved abroad
- Just 7% had a problem free experience contacting an offshore call centre
- Only 5% thought it is easier to contact an offshore call centre compared to when it was based in the UK
The vast majority of respondents experienced one or more problems talking to the overseas call centre:
- 88% found it difficult to understand the agent
- 57% felt that the agent had difficulty understanding the caller
- 42% felt the agent had insufficient knowledge of the product or service involved
- 41% felt that the call centre agent relied too much on scripts
- 38% felt that the agent had no or limited authority to resolve the caller’s issue
- 35% felt there was poor call quality or noise on the line
- 21% said that promises made were not kept
One of the reasons given for “offshoring” was to make it easier for customers to contact but only 5% of respondents thought it was. Just over a quarter felt it made no difference and 68% worse.
At that time BT was the most reported organisation for offshoring customer service calls, receiving twice as many mentions as any other organisation. Lets hope that in time the remaining 3,500 jobs (BT apparently had 5,500 agents working in India) are repatriated.
John Kemp
