Call centres have been scoring good marks in customer satisfaction with their services, a report from industry body, the Customer Contact Association (CCA) has announced.

The CCA’s newly-formed Customer Experience Council ended 2009 on a high, recording consumer satisfaction benchmarking scores at an average of 84 per cent*. The council is a service offered by the CCA to help organisations measure what matters in order to retain customers.

Research revealed that dealing with a knowledgeable person is the most important factor for a successful customer experience – far outweighing importance placed on other factors, such as time taken to answer or opening hours.

Anne Marie Forsyth, chief executive of the CCA, said: “This is not at all surprising given the high complexity of enquiries from customers who are concerned about a whole range of issues affecting their lives during a difficult economic climate.

“It is clear that investment in customer service and resisting the temptation to cut costs at the customer’s expense, will pay off as we look forward to better times ahead.”

CCA research director, Marcus Hickman, added: “There is always a cost pressure in the delivery of customer service and the dilemma at board level of how to deliver more for less. Having access to research like this, on a collective and individual level, is invaluable in order that we can measure what really matters to customers.”

*Through its Customer Experience Council, the CCA measured customer satisfaction for call handling across 21 leading organisations which take more than 400 million phone calls each year. From this data, 84 per cent of customers were satisfied with the service they had received.