Effective call centres are key to business deals with Thais

Bangkok - Call centre experience is largely influential on winning and retaining Thai customers with 73% of them willing to do business with a company if they had a great call centre experience and 67% of them stopping business relations with a company after poor call centre experience, a survey by global market research company Synovate shows.

Steven Britton, managing director of Synovate Thailand, said, "With increased levels of competition and greater consumer demands, Thai companies will need to act quickly in order to stay ahead. It should be nothing short of ensuring that each customer gets off the phone feeling like they had a great experience."

With a sample size of 1007 Thais across all income levels living in greater Bangkok, the survey explored consumer attitudes towards call centres in Thailand and produced significant results in relation to call management, customer satisfaction and new communication channels.

With regards to call management, call waiting is the biggest challenge for Thai call centres as 78% of respondents said they would put the phone down if they had to wait up to five minutes and more than half (58%) of respondents prefer to receive a return call instead of waiting on the other side of the line.

Courtesy calls are shown to be well-received with significantly more respondents reacting positively instead of negatively (36% vs. 17%). The survey also found out that 88% of respondents are willing to participate in a customer satisfaction survey after contacting a call centre while 68% of respondents said they would feel better about a company after having participated in a customer satisfaction survey.

Voice calls are the preferred choice for consumers when contacting a company but the survey also revealed a demand for the use of email (14%), particularly among teenagers and respondents in their twenties. In receiving information about a company's products and services, 51% of respondents prefer SMS whereas 57% of Thais said they are willing to provide feedback to a call centre via SMS.