Study: Multi-channel customer service disappoints

It appears that not much has changed since Transversal’s first Annual Multi-Channel Customer Service Study in 2005. When the 100 or so websites involved in the latest study were searched for answers to routine customer service questions only 50% of those questions were answered within the website.

In instances where answers to questions were not available on a website, email contact was used. Disappointingly, the response was slow taking 46 hours, on average, to receive a reply, of which only 46% contained a complete answer.

Out of numerous sectors covered in the study, including banking, telecoms, travel, insurance and consumer electronics retail, insurance was the worst offender when it came to quality of email replies. Just 10% of email replies answered the original question. An astonishing half of all insurance email replies went answered, found the study, and 40% of replies asked the sender to telephone.

The utilities sector showed the most improvement in email response times – from 102 hours in 2006 to a still slow 53 hours in 2007 – and the fastest email response came from a consumer electronics company and arrived within 10 minutes.

“Companies are playing ping pong with email enquiries, pushing them back to the web or forcing consumers to call contact centers. What is the point in paying staff to respond to customers’ questions badly?” commented Dee Roche, Director of Marketing, Transversal. “With consumers increasingly demanding personalized service, email should be at the forefront of delivering tailored responses that help convert browsers into customers. Some organizations are doing this extremely well but the general picture is of lazy, generic replies – if companies eventually respond.”

Tags: contact center, customer service, email response, multi-channel, telephone response