Why customers still prefer to call your contact centre

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.

Image Source: www.customercontactcentral.com

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.

Customer Contact Central

 

270219

 

 

We think you’ll like these too...

Blog

What is Round-trip Time and How it Relates to Network Latency?

Round-trip time is an important metric that can indicate the quality of communications available between two end-points. It’s a metric that our team often discusses …

Read More
Blog

CX – The ROI of phone number testing

Phone number testing and voice quality testing may not be familiar to some. But, to the many businesses that proactively test and monitor, the return …

Read More
Blog

Revolutionize Your Remote Call Center Operations: Introducing Agent Assure

Agent Assure is a new tool that helps call center managers and IT support teams troubleshoot internet connectivity and call quality issues for work-from-home agents. …

Read More
Blog

Our guide to the best IVR testing strategies to boost your CX game

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology is a widely used, highly effective means of automating customer contact services. It is a game changer for call centers, …

Read More

Not Ready Yet?

Subscribe for updates