The Big Customer Service Disconnect [Infographic]

A Survey conducted by Virtual Hold Technology reveals a startling customer service disconnect: while organizations increasingly say customer service is a top priority, consumers are not seeing improvements even at the most basic levels.

Everyone agrees customer service is important. But just how important is it?

The team at Virtual Hold Technology conducted a survey of 500 people over the age of 18, with an equal age and gender distribution across the respondents. 90% of survey respondents said that a positive customer experience would increase their loyalty. Reminder: retaining loyal customers is much easier than acquiring new ones.

So where does traditional customer service fall short? The results may surprise you:

• 96% of those surveyed report they have to repeat information (account details, explanation of issue, etc.) to call center agents. Whatever happened to intelligent and contextual call routing?


• Customers increasingly demand that businesses be more proactive about customer service. 53.8% of those surveyed do not want to wait on hold or call back if a customer service rep isn’t available right away; in fact, these folks prefer a callback from the company. Despite this, how many companies do you know that offer callback options?


• While phone remains the most popular form of support, this preference is gradually shifting to other channels, e.g., social media, mobile. Everybody’s talking about multi-channel support yet as consumers, we know multichannel implementation remains a rarity.

Why is there such a big disconnect between what businesses say about prioritizing customer service and their inability to deliver on even the most fundamental best practices?

Consider the following:

• Companies are paying lip service to customer service yet not delivering


• Deployments are currently happening but not complete


• Companies are making the customer service overhaul too complicated and not focusing on basics like intelligent routing/contextual transfers and cutting down on hold times.

Regardless of the causes, if companies don’t take immediate action to eradicate the disconnect, they risk causing significant and potentially irrevocable damage to the most valuable asset they have — their customers.

via Business 2 Community http://ift.tt/1iV5zv4