We’ve spent a decade investing in digital channels to move customers away from the phone.
So why does voice still account for 62% of inbound customer interactions — only 14 percentage points lower than it was 20 years ago?
One explanation is that digital channels are quietly funnelling frustrated customers straight back to the most expensive channel.
Consider how often digital interactions fail and escalate to a live agent:
• 21% of web self-service sessions end in a phone call
• 25% of emails and web chats escalate to an agent
• 37% of social media interactions do the same
Each of those calls costs an average of $7.16 (around £6.25 in the UK), compared with roughly $0.40 for a voice AI self-service interaction — a 94% cost difference.
The problem isn’t just cost.
Customers don’t arrive on the phone neutral. They’ve already failed to get what they need elsewhere. They’ve abandoned one channel, searched for a phone number, waited in a queue, and then had to explain everything again to a contact centre agent who often has little or no context.
And when customers choose the phone, it’s usually for the moments that matter most: high-complexity, high-urgency, and high-emotion situations where loyalty is won or lost.
With voice AI, even when self-service can’t fully resolve the issue, the experience is fundamentally different. Customers can be authenticated, explain their problem once, and be transferred with context intact. The agent starts where the AI left off, rather than at the beginning.
Voice isn’t the channel of the past.
Done right, with AI at its core, it’s becoming the channel of the future.
Today sees the launch of ContactBabel’s new white paper, “Voice AI: Transforming the Channel of Choice”, available in both UK and US editions. (The statistics above are from the US edition.) To download a copy Click Here
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