Forty-Four Percent of Customers Say Companies Don't Make Customer Service Easy

Ask anyone middle aged or older today about their experiences doing business with companies, and most of them will tell you that it’s much more difficult today. While Americans have less leisure time on their hands than ever and work longer hours, the time it takes to settle issues with companies seems to lengthen. There are longer hold times, more calls (because of mistakes or conflicting information) and longer waits for responses in digital channels. Once upon a time, most people would contact companies directly. Today, more often than not, customer queries go through middlemen, which adds time and errors to the process.

Customers today value “easy” when it comes to doing business. There is evidence, however, that a large majority of companies aren’t making it easy. A recent report by Northridge Group entitled, “State of Customer Service Experience 2016” found that 44 percent of customers say that companies do not make it easy to contact them. This is despite the increased lip service companies are paying to “omnichannel customer experiences.”

“In business, we think about channels, but customers just want to fix the problem they are trying to address,” according to the report’s authors. “They begin a conversation with a brand in one channel and may attempt to continue it in another. Making that transition as seamless as possible through easy navigation, timely response and a consistent brand voice drives the most satisfying customer service experiences.”

The idea of “omnichannel,” or allowing customers to use a variety of well integrated communications channels to contact a company, should be a bonus to customers rather than a barrier. Yet the Northridge Group report found that more than half of customers – 55 percent – report using two or more communications channels to contact a company or brand before an issue is resolved. The valuable “first contact resolution” which sees customers’ issues resolved in a “one and done” manner seems unachievable by a large minority of companies: 40 percent of customers report they must contact a brand two or more times before a customer service issue is resolved.

While many companies embrace social media as a great way to reach out to customers with viral marketing campaigns, most companies are failing to offer customers what they really want via these channels: another means of resolving customer service problems or asking questions. The report found that 77 percent of consumers say they use social channels to contact companies as much or more than a year ago. For those consumers that contact brands on social media, 21 percent say they never even get a response.

For companies hoping to revamp their customer experience, the focus should be on providing an easy experience between all channels, regardless of the path customers chose to get to a contact center. As of 2016, however, a large minority of companies still have critical gaps between customer service expectations of excellence and the actual customer experience. 

Edited by Alicia Young