Less Than Half Of Consumers Satisfied With Email-Based Customer Service

Eight out of ten shoppers are willing to switch brands after a bad customer experience, according to a recent report by inContact, a cloud-based contact center software company.

The study suggests that a majority of consumers are unsatisfied with their recent customer service experience, regardless of the communication channel on which it occurred.

Fewer than half of respondents were satisfied with their experiences on websites, while email, voice calls, text and social media all hovered between 40% and 43% in customer satisfaction. Only 38% of customers are satisfied with their experience with mobile apps or virtual assistants, and just 29% of consumers are satisfied with their experiences with interactive voice response technology. 

Some companies, like British mobile game developer Playdemic, now only offer in-app customer support.

“We believe that in order to offer our players world-leading customer support having one, high-quality channel is the best way forward,” says Gareth Jones, head of production at Playdemic. “Doing it this way ensures our players have stepped through any relevant FAQs before submitting their issue, which in turn helps us speed up response times and minimize ticket queues.”

Jones asserts that in-app support helps build stronger customer loyalty, critical to the success of any mobile game that only makes money from in-app purchases. Playdemic has partnered with Helpshift, a mobile customer service platform, to power the game developer’s in-app support.

“App users don't want to email or call customer service because it's more work for them to do so,” says Abinash Tripathy, CEO at Helpshift. “Today's users highly value convenience, but calling customer service involves finding time and a quite space to do so, waiting on hold, and often being transferred around from representative to representative. It's a pain. Likewise, email is easy when you're sitting at your computer, but when you're on the go, it's much quicker and easier to send off a text-like message.”

Tripathy says that in-app support provides a more fluid customer experience for consumers because they never have to leave the mobile application for help. Being directed to a phone number or email address, Tripathy asserts, is a broken experience for an app user.

 

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