That's what consumers are telling call center operators in the UK, according to a recent survey.

British consumers rate the performance of call centers as "modest" at most. This was the finding of a spot satisfaction study of over 300 customers in Greater London conducted by market research firm Metric (UK) Ltd during December 2005. All respondents had used the call centre they rated during the week preceding the interview. Overall consumer satisfaction ranked as six on a ten point scale. Women and under-55s were the least satisfied with the performance of call centers.

The study further revealed that women's dissatisfaction was largely aimed at the call centre agents - with particular aspects having shortcomings cited as "agents are polite and friendly / not robots", "agents being concerned about the customer's issue", etc. Consumers aged 55+ were more dissatisfied with “agent being polite and friendly”, "feeling secure about personal information shared" and "need to wait due to computer problems".

The researchers add this interesting thought about the psychology of providing customer service:

"A collective look at the attributes on which women are significantly dissatisfied leads to a strong conjecture of a gender bias in operation on the part of male agents. When Metric quizzed about this to some Call Center experts they did not rule out the possibility but sighted another more generous to agent explanation. In their opinion when a woman calls it is a social plus business call for her. Unlike her male counterpart, she does not like to restrict herself to the business on hand only. She perhaps wants to share a few more things which the agents are neither trained nor allowed to indulge in. One interesting revelation from this study is the prime importance of the human component. The study indicated that the human component accounts for close to half of total satisfaction followed by system and technology issues which together with human component account for 64 % of the variation. Ironically what seems to be the highest customer priority is an area where call center performance is relatively weakest."

The company that did the survey is available here. There were some interesting methodological quirks to the research, which we're looking into; more to be posted here as we find out how the survey was conducted.