Purchasing call center services will be easier to evaluate in the future

According to Gunnar Sohn, editor-in-chief of the online news service “Neue Nachrichten”, the current market volume for the external purchase of call center services is around two billion euros a year. In the opinion of experts, however, there is a lack of price transparency despite the high purchasing volume.

The service quality offered and the service requirements when placing the order would also play a central role, but these have not yet been recorded in any regular survey in Germany. That is why the “Federal Association of Materials Management, Purchasing and Logistics” (BME), together with the international call center business association “CCBenchmarks”, collected data on the purchase of call center services in German-speaking countries. The study “Purchasing Call Center Services” is to be published at the end of September 2009. The new price and quality index is intended to enable buyers to precisely compare prices and qualities. For example, 15 different call typologies were queried in the price queries for inbound and outbound. In addition, the study provided companies with information such as evaluation methods for service quality or the criteria primarily used by companies for the selection of call center service providers.

In the opinion of Bernhard Steimel, spokesman for Voice Days plus, measurable quality standards are also necessary for voice computers. “That is why, since 2007, an industry-oriented standard for voice applications has been developed in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering and Organization and experts from the German-speaking specialist scene,” confirms Steimel. The results of the first project phase were published in the study “Guidelines – Quality Criteria for Speech Applications”. Even if the use of speech recognition is clearly superior to the DTMF tone dialing method (for example “Enter 1, if …”), one still has to dispel reservations in public. The standards of the Fraunhofer Institute, which have also proven themselves in other fields of technology, are an important contribution to this.

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