Millennials choose mobile to search, contact financial services and insurance companies

In their study of more than one million phone calls made by consumers who conducted mobile searches or clicked mobile ads for banks, lenders, auto insurers or life insurers, Marchex found that calls initiated from a mobile search skewed highly towards Millennials and Generation X.

“Millennials are playing a huge role in this trend that mobile-influenced offline purchases are expected to be the biggest portion of consumer spending from mobile, twenty times larger than m-commerce,” said John Busby, Marchex SVP of Consumer Insights.

Overall, insurance companies were found to reach low- and middle-income consumers via mobile ads, probably due to younger people being in the early stages of their careers.

Another key finding of the study was hang-ups are a considerable issue. A quarter of calls to national centers for financial services and insurance companies ended with a hang-up following an average hold time of 2 minutes. For calls made to local agents for branches the hang-up rate was 20% with an average hold time of just over one and a half minutes.

According to Poom Poochaiyanont, analytics manager at the Marchex Institute, the study suggests that financial services and insurance companies “could consider some pretty basic changes to address long hold times for incoming calls that are currently resulting in more than a 25% hang-up rate”.