Customer Service is very important when it comes to Sports Betting, it’s something we’ve discussed numerous times here at BSB. So we decided to test several South African Call Centre Response Times so they we could work out who has solid service and reasonable knowledge.
We set up the following metric to test their competency :
- Call wait time : How long it took them to answer the call, this does not include tele/dial prompts.
- Query resolution time : How long it took them to resolve our query.
- General attitude and friendliness of the staff at the call centre.
We used the following script : “Hi I’m Joe, I’m looking for the odds on Juventus to beat FC Porto in the Champions League on the 14th of March. I want the odds on a Juventus win”. We called between 13:00 – 14:00 on a Monday.
Without further ado here are the results, some you might find quite shocking! (Click image for Sheet download)
So what did we learn from the above?
Well we were surprised and the speed and efficiency of Marshall’s and Betxchange. Those call centre guys are really on the ball! The smaller books were quick to answer too with the staff of the smaller books a bit more knowledgeable than those of the big bookmakers. We did have a bad experience where Sportsbet asked us for an account and basically refused to tell us the odds of the game and actually hung up on us. A common response was go check on our site which is understandable but it’s best to resolve the query when it comes in. Supabets could not resolve the query as their site was down but did offer to call us back (we declined).
Overall the standard was pretty good and we didn’t have to wait too long anywhere. When we did wait there was a miscommunication or a transfer but nothing serious. We didn’t get to all bookmakers as some had their lines down or their systems were giving issues so we excluded those for now. We’ll be adding to this list in the coming months too.
We would like to conclude that service levels have reached an acceptable level and while our query was simple the agents did have to have some knowledge of markets and sports. We wanted to test the email responses but that could take weeks to get any data out of! Agree or Disagree? Let us know in the comments below.
You must have caught World of Sport on an extremely good day ….. Try the same thing 4 more times and see if you get the same results.
We will be doing a round 2 of the same test in the future Rocky. These are once off results and we’d like to have done it 5 times to see the results, which would be a truer reflection but trust us, round 2 is coming 🙂
Fantastic article well done. I’d like to have seen a mean average of say 3 calls for some proper averages but I’m sure that would take ages. Don’t bother with emails. I’m still waiting for a response on one of mine from 3 weeks ago. Keep up the good work.