Slow equipment and poor performance of systems are the main factor contributing to stress in UK contact centres, according to YouGov research.

Some 48 per cent of the 1,000 contact centre staff polled said that the IT systems they have to use represent the most annoying or stressful part of their job, even more so than customer complaints or not being able to help them.

Slow systems and constantly crashing applications were cited by 56 per cent of the respondents as the main cause of dissatisfaction, followed by 20 per cent mentioning over-complicated, user-unfriendly processes and having to cut and paste between applications due to poor systems integration, cited by 11 per cent.

The research also revealed that slow IT systems affect around 41 per cent of call centre agents daily and 86 per cent weekly.

"From the agent's perspective, IT is all about day-to-day desktop applications and the many different corporate systems that supply essential customer data - many of which aren't integrated, so we're regularly relying on agents to bring all these different components together,”said the report.

"Over a third of agents are using five or more application passwords to carry out their daily role, while 30 per cent of agents spend more than five minutes each logging into applications at the start of the day," it said.

"It is time for the corporate IT function to spend more time in the contact centre fixing these issues. Contact centres are an essential part of a successful customer experience, and organisations need to ensure that their core IT systems share the same best practice approach that they're already applying to their often lower value e-commerce operations."

The report was commissioned by Sabio Consultancy.