There have been many studies that have been published regarding the future of customer services in the UK. Many have suggested that despite a forecast in an increase in the use by consumers of digital channels, the telephone will continue to be the preferred and favoured manner of interaction with all.

The published research aimed to identify the trends over the next five years in customer service additionally revealed that whilst the digital channels were increasingly used to register and present their complaints by customers, they still preferred and continued to use the telephone to acquire their purchases.

The study disclosed there were two main concerns to improve the customers services with the first being the promptness of the call being resolved, scoring a high figure of eighty three per cent. The second is that their call was routed to the correct person with the right knowledge to answer their query, scoring seventy three per cent.

The responding agents at the contact centres have stated they have had their budgets reduced by up to twenty per cent compared to the levels of 2008, which severally restricted being able to provide the full range of customer services to the customer.

The budget restraints were further aggravated by the increase in the amount of interactive channels which the varying brands are required to monitor and respond to.

The report also explained that the actual performances of the call centres were considerably better than the actual perception of the public and media would suggest, with the benchmarks reporting that the average customer satisfaction was eight four per cent based on 467 million calls. These calls were handled by the large number of call centre member organisations across the UK which are becoming more popular. The first contact resolution had increased to eighty three per cent and the abandonment rates dropping down to just five per cent.

Representative spokesman for the call centre member organisations commented that the work which had been undertaken demonstrates that while there is an ever growing variety of communication channels between the organisations and their customers, the telephone answering and the phone will remain the primary method of interaction for some time to come.

Technologies such as voice recognition will undoubtedly play a huge part in improving customer service in UK contact centres.

It seems that the direct voice- to- voice contact, and immediate response, is far more superior than methods like email or social networking.