eGain, a provider of cloud-based customer engagement software, recently announced the findings of its latest industry survey. In the survey it commissioned Forrester (News - Alert) Consulting to complete, it found that opinion of customer service is either worse than it was last year or stagnant at best.
The online survey of 10,000 U.S. customers, “State of Omnichannel Customer Service,” cited the finding that 64 percent of customers in 2014 had switched their business to another provider as the result of poor customer service. This “switching economy” was worth $6.2 trillion dollars that year and represents a lot of lost business but also a lot of business to be gained. Unfortunately for customers, a majority of respondents rated customer service as “about the same” or “worse” across all industries in a range of modes of service.
The findings break down as follows:
• For omnichannel service, 65 percent of respondents rated “same” or “worse” for multiple channels in the same service interaction, and 70 percent rated similarly for multiple service personnel interactions in the same service interaction
• 68 percent of respondents also rated overall call center customer service, 67 percent rated IVR self-service, 63 percent rated Web-based self-service, and 61 percent rated agent-assisted Web customer service as “same” or “worse”
Ashu Roy, the CEO of eGain, commented on this state of affairs. He noted that disconnected channels can disrupt multi-person interactions and that a lack of industry knowledge can make all customer service experiences poorer.
“Disconnected point solutions and lack of knowledge, as evident from our previous consumer survey, disrupt customer journeys across touchpoints,” Roy said. “An omnichannel customer engagement hub, powered by a smart knowledge engine, can help deliver easy, on-target service journeys both for the customer and the agent.”
What this means for businesses is that their efforts to maintain a virtual presence are not improving their overall brand experiences. Omni-channel customer engagement can allow customers to shop online or through social media and troubleshoot their product and service issues in real time with live agents. Well, that is the goal – to create unified brand identity and ease of use across multiple communications channels and brick-and-mortar stores. If this eGain survey is any indication, however, businesses have not stepped up their game to make a connected world a functional reality for their customers.
Edited by Maurice Nagle