Social media may be “blunting” the impact of negative word-of-mouth, according to the latest Call Centre Satisfaction Index.

The study, undertaken by the CFI Group, revealed that while a bad experience may increase the odds that someone will tell others, the sheer number of positive experiences and positive posts seems to be outweighing the negative word-of-mouth in volume.

CFI Group conducted the study of customer satisfaction with call centres and found a shift to self-service.  The survey revealed that 27% of respondents had tried to resolve their issues elsewhere prior to resorting to working with the call centre, primarily on the web.

Other findings from the report showed that private sector call centre satisfaction has declined from last year. Property and casualty insurance call centres led the sector whilst health insurance call centres and personal computer call centres experienced the strongest growth, according to the report.

The report also revealed that call centres that provide first-call-resolution and minimise call transfers score much higher. This suggests that technology that empowers call representatives may be a good investment, said the group.

Terry Redding from CFI Group said: “What we are seeing is that, if you have a bad experience, you post it once on Facebook for all to see and then you're done with it. By the same token, we are seeing good experiences posted in the same way. In fact, we've observed that positive comments generally outweigh negative ones almost as a rule.”

He added: “This is the first year since we've fielded that study that we've seen a decrease in overall score on the private sector side. We feel the drop is due to an increasing number of easier calls being offloaded to self-service channels like the web, leaving the more complex cases going to the call centres.”