• by Ray Schultz , March 3, 2022

Consumers prefer the phone for remote interactions with brands, with email being second. But the phone has serious drawbacks, including the belief that carriers are not doing enough to control spam calls, according to The State Of The Call report by performance phone platform Hiya.

The consumers polled prefer these channels for interactions:

• Phone Call — 32%
• Email — 20%
• Text Messaging/IM — 12%
• Video Call — 6%
• Website Chatbots — 5%
• Other/NA — 26%

But customers are wary of answering the phone, given the high preponderance of spam calls (perhaps outpacing even email spam). Last year, there were 117 billion spam and fraud calls in the six countries studied, broken down as follows:

• U.S.: 80.1B (18 per user per month)
• France: 12.4B (21 per user per month)
• Spain: 8.9B (20 per user per month)
• U.K.: 6.6B (12 per user per month)
• Germany: 5.9B (6 per user per month)
• Canada: 3.1B (6 per user per month)

Half of all businesses lost a customer or a deal because of not being able to reach them by phone, the study says. The result: 97% would pay a premium per call for branded caller ID. 

Meanwhile, 36% of businesses expect to increase their use of voice in the next 12 months and 50% say it will remain the same. 

The study is based on analysis of more than 150 billion calls, and surveys of 12,000 consumers and 2,000 businesses in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Germany, Spain, and France.