“Tired of waiting” – Three in four consumers ready to walk away if customer service is poor
Enghouse Interactive Survey highlights scale of frustrations with the pandemic customer experience
Over half of consumers (52%), polled for a new survey conducted by Enghouse Interactive, said the customer service they received from businesses got worse during the pandemic. That compares with just 17% who thought it had improved. The survey also revealed that 29% of respondents said they had to wait more than a week for a business to give them an answer to a query during the pandemic.
This is a big issue given the declining levels of customer patience over the past two years. 39% of the sample said they would only be prepared to wait in a virtual queue for up to ten minutes to speak to a human advisor to get a problem resolved, while a further 33% said 10-20 minutes.
In line with this, being kept waiting on a telephone call was the biggest customer service frustration consumers had experienced since the start of the pandemic, identified by 70%. This was followed by ‘going through an automated phone menu but still not getting the answers I need’ (56%) and ‘having to repeat the same information multiple times on one call’ (53%).
Judith Schuder VP of Marketing at Enghouse Interactive, said:
“Customers want to interact with organisations that value their time, in ways that are painless, quick, and easy. Businesses need to focus on finding ways to simplify interactions; keep waitng times down and reduce frustration by offering virtual waiting or proactive callbacks within a set time period.”
But it is not just being kept waiting that annoys consumers, they also get upset about a failure to resolve queries at first contact. 21% say they get just 50% or fewer of their queries resolved the first time they contact an organisation. And businesses are likely to pay a price for poor customer service. 76% of consumers are likely to stop buying from a business following one bad customer service experience.
Schuder added: “Today’s customers prize ease of doing business even over the quality of the goods they receive. The pandemic has strengthened their expectations around quality customer service and rapid response. Businesses can’t afford to ignore this key learning point if they want to stay competitive in the new digital age.”
To download the ‘Changing Landscape of Customer Communications’ survey by Enghouse Interactive Click Here
Enghouse Interactive is a leading global contact centre and video solutions provider that has been serving thousands of customers for over 35 years. Enghouse Interactive solutions enable customers to deliver winning customer experiences by transforming the contact centre from a cost centre into a powerful growth engine. Enghouse Interactive’s core values – reliability and choice – are key differentiators in the global marketplace. Reliability speaks to Enghouse Interactive’s reputation for always honouring commitments to customers, staff, partners and investors. Choice is reflected in the unparalleled breadth of its customer experience (CX) portfolio, which enables customers to choose from a wide array of solutions and consulting practices, whether deployed on-premise, in the cloud or on a hybrid platform. By providing a broad range of technologies and capabilities based on open standards, Enghouse Interactive simplifies the advanced integrations that customers require.
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