Sounds like an episode of "Fawlty Towers," doesn't it?

A recent survey conducted by GMI and commissioned by European IP communications provider Wicom Communications found cultural differences in end user attitudes towards and experiences with call centers in the UK and Germany. The survey was conducted this month (February, 2007) among 1,000 end users in Germany and the UK.

When asked for the motive/reasons behind calls to customer support centers, answers across both countries were consistent. Around 73 percent of respondents in both countries contacted a call center typically for general inquiries. "It may be a cliché, however the results reflect some of the cultural differences between the two countries.

To tech editors, mid-to-late February becomes fodder for a horror movie. The phone never stops ringing, the e-mails pour in, and the briefing requests come in faster than our Outlook calendars (or editors' brains) can handle them.

Contrast this to mid-January: this is a time when tech editors are desperately writing up and posting any news, no matter how slight ("CRM Software Provider Moves Location Of 'Open Here' Instructions On Product Packaging!") out of sheer desperation. Why is the news so slow then? Because no one is announcing any new products.

Recently released research by Purdue University's BenchmarkPortal has revealed that call centers tend to prefer "all-in-one" contact center solutions that serve all (or most) of a call center's needs rather than a mix of point solutions from different vendors.

Integration was identified as the most critical condition behind this preference: all-in-one systems were preferred over point solutions based on their ability to support additional applications with virtually no modification or integration issues, and for their ability to "lower administrative costs by reducing support staff by a full 25 percent."

“Our findings show that, in general, all-in-one communications systems contain the same core ‘best-of-breed’ applications required by contact centers as their multi-point counterparts, and that they come with the advantages of fewer interfaces, lower support requirements, simplified management, and easier access to performance data across applications,” said BenchmarkPortal research analyst, Bruce Belfiore.

Another interesting result of the Benchmark Portal survey was that the three applications call centers are most likely to implement over the next year are post call surveys, Web chat and multimedia queuing.

To read more in-depth about the survey, visit www.benchmarkportal.com.

TES