ACXPA chief executive Justin Tippett
A new research program is set to lift the lid on the comparative performance of call centres operated by Australia’s leading banks.
The Australian Customer Experience Professionals Association (ACXPA) has begun measuring the response times and service levels of bank call centres using a mystery shopping methodology.
Each month the ACXPA makes a minimum of three random calls to each of the banks’ call centres seeking information about basic banking products such as term deposits and transaction accounts.
Data and information gathered from each call is then assessed against 48 different performance metrics.
The ACXPA is also conducting research on the quality of call centres in other service industries and the early comparative findings ranked the performance of the domestic banking industry at the bottom of the pile.
The overall performance of the largest Australian retail banks was assessed at less than 26.7 per cent effective in August.
No other industry performed that badly, with the next worst – the retail energy sector – posting an overall ranking for quality and response times of 53 per cent.
ACXPA chief executive Justin Tippett said the research program was at an embryonic stage of development after the initial publication of research findings for August and September 2023.
While the early findings look ominous for the banking sector, Tippett believes the research program will provide more definitive lessons over time.
As banks cull their branch networks and migrate customers to online services, Tippett says banks have plenty to lose in terms of brand reputation and customer loyalty if their call centres are shown to be consistent underperformers.
“Contact centres are increasingly the only live interaction a customer has with a bank and in a highly commoditised marketplace where the products are largely the same, the customer experience, whether via a contact centre or digital service, is going to be the key differentiator that customers are going to base their loyalty decisions on,” he said.
“Based on our August 2023 data, banks were rated as the poorest performers of all industry sectors in both accessibility and the quality of the interactions.”
Tippett said the initial findings identified the length of customer wait times as a key indicator of underperformance across most of the banking sector.
“In our September 2023 report, 39 per cent of calls we made to bank contact centres were not answered within 10 minutes - so they were lost sales opportunities,” he said.
While the banking industry underperformed all other sectors on average wait times to access a live agent, there was marked variation in the average response times of individual banks.
The poor sector average, according to the ACXPA, was mostly attributable to ANZ, Bendigo Bank and ING, which answered only one-third of calls within ten minutes.
However, the banking sector average was enhanced by more efficient response times at contact centres operated by NAB and CBA, which answered all calls within ten minutes.
Under the ACXPA methodology calls to contact centres are terminated after a 10-minute wait.
This suggests that average wait times for ANZ, Bendigo and ING that were assessed at above six minutes, were likely to have been much longer.
“Unfortunately, we have to disconnect after waiting for ten minutes - that’s just a practical limitation of managing the costs of doing this sort of research,” Tippett said.