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Multichannel Customer Support Still Has a Long Way to Go in the UK
The state of customer service today seems to be in a bit of a flux. While certain companies are doing amazing things for customers – think of Amazon with its live help “May Day” button, or Zappos, that has practically turned customer service into a religion – a majority of companies are still lagging. Organizations in certain verticals (telecommunications!) have become punchlines thanks to their abysmal customer service. This is a problem, because in a commoditized global marketplace, customer service excellence may be some companies’ only differentiating point.
Part of the reason for the flux is the proliferating number of channels customers expect to be able to use. No company is going to be able to excel in every channel, from phone to chat to e-mail to mobile app to SMS to live video calls. Companies that try to excel in every channel are likely to fail in nearly all of them, unless they have deep pockets and unlimited resources.
Another reason that customer support seems to be getting worse is that customer expectations are rising, and most organizations simply cannot keep up, according to UK-based customer support consultant Adrian Swinscoe writing for Forbes.
Swinscoe cites Eptica’s recent released 2015 Multichannel Customer Experience Study, a summary of the state of customer support in the UK. The report, which evaluated the customer service capabilities of 100 leading UK companies by measuring how they responded to relevant questions sent to them via their web, email, social media and chat customer service channels, found that Web-based channels are the best attended, but the figures still aren’t good.
“The Web comes out on top as the best channel for delivering customer service with the surveyed companies successfully answering 64 percent of questions, on average,” Swinscoe wrote. “This is up on last year but the report raises some serious concerns about the growing gap between the best and worst performers.”
So even the “best channel” is failing customers more than one-third of the time. E-mail is still a popular channel with customers in the UK, and the study found that although response times in that channel have improved, there are some concerns about the quality and accuracy of the responses customers are receiving via e-mail. In the meantime, social media channels and SMS (text) are catching up as customer channels of choice, and many companies are frantically trying to ramp up their service offerings there, but they’re not doing it with adequate capital and manpower.
At this point, most companies are at a crossroads, according to Swinscoe, and it means that customer support quality may get worse before it gets better.
“What we do know is that customer behavior is changing and companies need to either step up their service and experience efforts and improve investment, resourcing and performance across the board or, potentially, face a rising tide of complaints from their increasingly demanding customers,” he wrote.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi