Top Highlights From the Latest Decision-Makers’ Guide

Telephony accounts for over 64% of customer enquiries despite costing 57% more than email and 83% more than web chat. Contact centre metrics have changed considerably. Whereas once operational metrics such as average call duration and cost-per-call were considered the most important, today ‘customer satisfaction ratings/Net Promoter Scores (NPS)’ are top priority for 60% of contact centres. Meanwhile, agents are spending more time with customers. In 2023, the average call lasted 421 seconds, almost double the time it took 20 years ago. This might be because organisations have allowed call times to increase as customer experience takes centre stage, calls have become more complex and digital self-service has taken over for easier short calls.

Above all, customers crave the personal touch corroborated by 88% of organisations that believe the main reason customers move from web self-service to telephony is because of the reassurance a live agent can bring to a conversation. The large majority (64.1%) of inbound calls are by telephone, streets ahead of email (at 19.4%) and web chat (at just 6.5%) despite the average telephone call costing the most at £5.58 compared with £3.55 for email and £3.05 for web chat.

Identity theft is high profile and fraud prevention is a brand issue, as well as a regulatory one. Seventy-one percent of large contact centres state they are concerned about external fraud where callers pretending to be another person. Industry-wide, 76% of all UK calls require a security and identification process to be completed first, the highest on record and it’s still predominantly a manual process.

The latest Decision Makers Guide shows 92% of calls were reported to be authenticated by agents and each call typically took 44 seconds. ContactBabel estimates that if an agent takes 80 calls per day, they will spend around 45 minutes of an 8-hour shift doing the mundane and repetitive task of taking customers through security. When other factors like cost-per-call and call duration are taken into consideration, UK contact centres are spending £2.19billion per year on agent-handled security and identification checking.

Fortunately, automated technology is available to help, however, only 8% of calls are authenticated with DTMF touchtone IVR, and 1% of organisations use speech recognition to identify the caller. Fewer than 1% are handled through the latest innovation, voice biometrics.

The first step towards saving time and money, while reducing customer agent effort is to work closely with an approved Level One PCI DSS supplier such as Encoded. Look for a supplier that has the knowledge, experience and latest tech to keep your business and customers safe in a highly sustainable way. For example, modern Agent Assisted Payment solutions with an added Fraud Prevention Platform allow contact centres to process card payments quickly and cost-effectively without being exposed to sensitive card data.

The majority (68%) of organisations take card payments in the contact centre. However, the cost of compliance means that some contact centres have stopped taking payments altogether, particularly small and medium-sized contact centres where the effect of cost compliance has been significant.

Of those using technology to reduce card fraud, pause and resume recording is by far the most widely used method (59%) while only 11% rely on tokenisation. The latter is surprising because modern tokenisation technology and PCI compliance make perfect partners. Tokenisation allows recurring payments to be made securely without the customer having to repeat their card details. No cardholder data enters the contact centre environment, placing it outside of scope for PCI DSS and making data hacking and theft far more difficult.

Almost half (49%) of organisations are turning to third party cloud-based solutions and providers rather than in-house technology, or the processes necessary to ensure PCI compliance. In fact, the use of third-party cloud-based payment solutions has increased over 400% in 10 years from 9% in 2014.

Encoded is one of the UK’s only payment gateways and orchestration platforms with its own telephony platform, meaning that its contact centre payment solutions are built-in from the ground up. To read ContactBabel’s full report, download ‘The 2024 UK Contact Centre Decision-Makers’ Guide’. To discover how Encoded can simplify today’s complex payment challenges, contact us to learn more.