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Poor Call Centre Performances Driving Motorists To Go Online For Insurance
By: Rich Green
In their efforts to cut costs more and more finance companies are looking to use
offshore call centres to provide their customer services and administration.
This is especially prevalent in the insurance industry, where it seems as if
there is a newspaper announcement of previously UK based services migrating
abroad every day. As more insurers use offshore call centres, recent research
from Swinton insurance shows that motorists are increasingly turning to the
internet to find the best deal on their car insurance.
Drivers are constantly advised to search around and obtain multiple quotes when
it comes to renewal time, with recent research showing that drivers needed to
obtain at least seven car insurance quotes to be likely to have found their most
competitive deal, on average £52.26 better than their first quote. However with
47 per cent of those looking for car insurance taking more than ten minutes to
obtain a single quote by phone, while a single quick search on a website like
Moneynet, or Insure Supermarket can provide immediate comparisons of tens or
hundreds of car insurance providers, it is understandable that people are
turning towards the internet as a means of shopping around for the best deals.
It is not only the length of time taken by the call centres that motorists
appear to have a problem with. The study found that the number of motorists
looking for car insurance online has now reached 681,000 with many of them
citing poor call centre performance, and doubts over the efficacy of the call
centres as the main reasons why they are no longer using the phone to obtain
insurance.
Most of those questioned indicated that concerns over the levels of customer
service provided by call centres, with offshore centres targeted in particular,
was a major factor for them fuelling a move from phone to the internet. Rightly
or wrongly, most of those surveyed felt that the service provided, and the time
taken for problems to be resolved, by offshore call centres would be slower,
when compared with their UK call centres counterparts.
Despite the high levels of respondents reporting being unhappy with the customer
service provided by UK call centres, and general levels of dissatisfaction with
call centre staff growing, the phone is still most drivers' favoured method of
buying cover. Swinton claims almost two thirds of UK motorists indicated they
use the phone to buy their car insurance, while the number of motorists
purchasing their cover online has now risen to 23%. The AA have stated that the
figures are actually closer to 40% of all new car insurance now being arranged
on the internet, with online sales of car insurance last year growing by nearly
two-thirds.
However, even with the growth in the number of people using the internet and
despite all the safety measures implemented to facilitate online transactions,
more than a million motorists are reported as still not trusting the internet as
a safe purchasing tool, and feel safer using the phone to speak directly to a
person. This is despite recent news reports of the bank account details of 1,000
UK customers, including passwords, addresses and passport data, held by Indian
call centres, being sold to an undercover reporter from the Sun.
Andrew Jackson, marketing director for Swinton said, "We believe that despite
the increase in the number of people purchasing car insurance on the internet,
the phone will continue to be a popular method as long as providers ensure that
their call centres provide good quality customer service,".
However unless call centre based companies redress the publics perceptions of
poor performance offered by call centres, they are liable to find more motorists
trying to find other options, and if the internet based insurance providers can
convince the increasingly technologically savvy public that buying online is
safe, then we may soon see the rapid decline of call centres and see the
internet becoming the primary source of information for motorists in their quest
for cheaper car insurance.
About the Author:
Richard works in Edinburgh for Bigmouthmedia (
www.bigmouthmedia.com ),occasionally writing for the personal finance blog Cashzilla (
cashzilla.blogspot.com/ ), and drinking too much coffee. References: AA ( www.theaa.com/ )
Moneynet ( www.moneynet.co.uk ) Swinton (
www.swinton.co.uk/ ) |
