Research & Markets Offering New Frost & Sullivan Customer Contact Study

Dublin, Ireland-based research aggregator Research & Markets is this week announcing that it has added Frost & Sullivan's (News - Alert) new report "Customer Contact Experience Benchmarks - PC Manufacturers Industry" to its offering. The report assesses the current state of the customer contact experience in the U.S.

Frost & Sullivan's new study benchmarks various customer contact experience attributes such as customer satisfaction, customer experience and customer loyalty for the PC manufacturers industry across multiple contact channels including, live agent phone via call center, interactive voice response (IVR), e-mail, Web chat and Web self-service. A Web-based survey methodology was used for this study, which sampled 1,760 PC customers in the U.S.

According to the study, the most popular contact channels for customers shopping for PCs are live agent via call center and e-mail. Web site self-service and Web site chat with live agents have been used by fewer customers, and interactive voice response (IVR) remains the least popular. The study shows that despite still-low usage of Web self-service, that channel is becoming more popular, and though Web chat is still underused in most customer service settings, it has far higher penetration in PC shopping.

The report found that customer satisfaction is highest in Web self-services, and this is followed by e-mail and phone-live agent. IVR has the lowest customer satisfaction among all channels in the industry. In general, the experience of getting through to a customer service representative is rated quite favorably. A majority of customers who contacted a PC manufacturer call center agent by phone spoke with only one agent.

Companies benchmarked in this study include Acer, Apple, Asus, Dell (News - Alert), Gateway, HP, Lenovo, Panasonic, Toshiba, Samsung, Sony and others.

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Edited by Rachel Ramsey