With all the hype about omnichannel, the phone call still rules
Summarised on Customer Contact Central, an interesting survey looks at channel preferences. It highlights that consumers will use up to nine channels to contact a supplier to try and get the result they want. Webchat and social media are on the rise as preferred contact channels. However, respondents overwhelmingly declared their preference for the telephone.
The leading channels remain telephone and email. Outside of these, none of the other channels were the number one preference for any contact reason.
Customers with problems want to speak to an agent
Contacting an agent was the preference when customers had a problem to solve. Self-service channels such as mobile-apps and text are fine for making a purchase or payment. These, however, don’t offer the real-time personal engagement consumers want when complex problems are involved.
While self-service channels may have seen growth in usage in recent years, the survey found that they may drive more frustration with customers than success. That frustration may spill over into frustrated calls into the contact center.
The quality of your customer’s call
When they choose to pick up the phone, the quality your customer experiences remains as important as ever.
With telephone as the preferred channel, the last thing you need is for that customer to experience a problem with their call to you. This is especially true where the customer is trying to address a product or service problem.
If the call fails to connect, or the voice quality is poor, the initial problem may seem magnified from the customer’s perspective.
Your customers rely on inbound voice, but can you?
Our recent report on the global quality of inbound voice calls showed that as many as 1 in 15 calls from some countries fail to connect. That’s 1 in 15 customers calling a local contact number and failing to get through.
We also found that, for a number of countries, the voice quality of calls averaged at a level that would require attention or effort for the caller to hold a conversation. Again, not the experience a customer is hoping for when they call in with a problem to solve.
For more information on what our testing revealed about inbound voice performance globally, download our whitepaper ‘2020 Global telecoms quality of service report‘ now.
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