For me, the contact centre is the most valuable function in a business. There are two main reasons why this is the case. The first is that the contact centre, as the hub of all customer interactions, is also at the centre of all the insights a business gathers. The second, more prosaic reason, is that customers still want to forge human connections with the brands they do business with.

To make this vision a reality, however, we need to reverse the recent alarming slump in customers’ perception of customer service quality. Let’s take a look at how.

The Paradox of Modern Customer Service

Public attitudes towards customer service are deteriorating. You hear about it all the time in the news headlines. For the last three years, at the CCMA, we have been tracking consumer opinions on customer service.

Asked if they thought customer service standards were improving, in 2022 a total of 21% said yes and 31% said no, they thought standards were backsliding. When we asked the same question again in 2023, there was a significant shift, with only 18% saying there had been improvement in the previous 12 months and 34% saying the opposite.

What’s behind this trend?

KPIs Heading Downhill

For over a decade, ContactBabel has been tracking operational KPIs like Average Handle Time and Time To Answer in its annual survey of the UK contact centre industry, The Contact Centre Decision Maker’s Guide. Warning: You might find the graphs below a little shocking, so maybe peek at them through your fingers the first time.

Here we see Speed to Answer and Call Abandonment Rates, as collected by ContactBabel, since 2004:

This tells us that, despite decades of investment in queue management systems, call diversion technologies, non-voice channels, and automated interaction handling systems, we are not getting better at answering calls.

These most basic fundamental metrics predictably spiked during the pandemic and have remained stubbornly high ever since. However, the general trend was upward even before 2020. The harsh truth is that customers are waiting longer than ever to speak to a human and giving up more frequently than before.

Average Handle Time has also risen, for both sales and service calls. Rather than being a signifier of problems, this likely reflects a recent strategic shift. Contact centres have become quite successful at automating simpler interactions, meaning human advisors are left to handle only increasingly complex conversations, and these naturally take longer to resolve.

We can conclude that customer needs and expectations are escalating, and the demand to talk to you is growing. Despite all the process and technological changes we’re making to our operations, keeping up is almost impossible.

Yet there are promising signs. Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and First Contact Resolution (FCR) rates are improving steadily despite the longer wait times. This suggests that the changes being made by the contact centre industry are making a difference.

However, it’s important to understand that customer service is not necessarily synonymous with contact centre experience. Customer service is much broader than the contact centre. It includes home visits from field teams to fix appliances. It includes customers visiting restaurants and stores or taking public transport.

When we say that the perception of customer service is getting worse, how much do those non-contact centre interactions skew the picture?

The ‘Category Effect’: Understanding Sector Differences

Let’s first take a look at the public perception of customer service by sector.

One of the most fascinating findings from our recent research is what we at the CCMA call ’the category effect’. As you can see from the chart below, customer service perceptions vary dramatically across sectors. And there is an apparent divide between the commercial and public sectors. Government services, utilities, and public transport typically return poorer satisfaction scores, while retail, broadband providers, and airlines fare better.

This disparity isn’t simply about competence. Commercial organisations are typically more agile and better funded. They are able to adapt more quickly to customer feedback. Public sector services, on the other hand, often have to deal with more complex and emotionally charged issues. Media coverage also tends to be more negative for sectors like public services, where there is little choice. Finally, people tend to hold public institutions to a higher account than commercial businesses.

The category effect is also compounded by the frequency and emotional intensity of customers’ interactions. Consider the contrast between a retail bank, where customers regularly check their account balances and make transactions, versus a utility provider that customers typically only need to contact for emergencies, faults or billing issues.

The Human Touch is a Critical Differentiator

The good news is that consumers recognise that the contact centre does not represent all customer service. They distinguish between the work done by frontline advisors, self-service processes and brands. Generally, across all sectors, the view was that advisors all make an effort to help customers, even in government contact centres.

We tracked this by asking consumers whether they felt customer service advisors made an effort to help customers. Here are the results across sectors.

Compare these results to the overall customer satisfaction results for each sector. What leaps out are the huge differences between the scores.

Across every sector, from government services to retail, customers rate advisor effort significantly higher than overall service quality. Even in industries which struggle with customer satisfaction, such as government services (scoring -25 net for overall service), customers still acknowledge that advisors are trying to help (scoring +1 for effort). This gap is most pronounced in banking, where overall service perception is neutral (0), but advisor effort scores an impressive +34.

The disparity between the two scores tells an important story. When customers are expressing their frustration with service quality, they’re typically not criticising the human frontline who answer their calls. Instead, their dissatisfaction likely stems from broader systemic issues such as organisational processes, policies, or technology limitations.

This suggests that the human element of customer service is consistently rated more positively than overall service perception, highlighting the critical role that human interactions still play in customer service. The contact centre, particularly the live voice channel, is clearly positively impacting customer service perceptions, and to a massive extent.

The Continued Evolution of Customer Service

Thanks to the ongoing onslaught of technology and social media, we are moving quickly from a Convenience Economy – where consumers expect to be empowered to make their purchases and receive service when they want it, how they want it and where they want it – to the Instant Economy – where consumers expect to transact in seconds whilst getting real-time updates at every stage.

Generally, we rely on technology to deliver that level of customer service. However, if an automated customer journey doesn’t work for a particular individual, they immediately want to talk to someone who can resolve their query quickly.

Right now, we believe a new paradigm is emerging, which we call the Attention Economy. In this new model, time is the ultimate currency. When customers give their time and attention to your organisation to get an issue resolved, they are sacrificing moments that could be spent elsewhere – with their children, enjoying nature, or connecting with loved ones. This realisation is driving a fundamental shift in how contact centres approach customer experience.

So, maybe your CX strategy should be about giving customers back their time.

Instead of the traditional KPIs, maybe you should be looking to minimise the time a customer spends interacting with you. This is not the same as AHT, FCR or Time to Resolve/Average Resolution Time. While those measure how long it takes to resolve a customer’s issue, it doesn’t tell you how much of the customer’s time was taken. Neither does Customer Effort, which measures a whole range of things, not just the customer’s time.

The contact centre can be a huge competitive advantage here for any brand brave enough to say that its aim is to give customers back their time. We can make a big difference to the public’s perception of customer service.

The contact centre has incredible strategic value – from the insights we’re gathering, to the change we can make, to how a person views your organisation. We need to keep listening to our customers, with a focus on solving queries as quickly as possible, to give customers back their time.