Customers Give Thumbs Down to E-mail - 16-Apr-08
E-mail is officially the UK’s worst channel for customer service, according to research from eService provider Transversal. Transversal’s third annual Multi-channel Customer Service Study has uncovered a growing crisis in e-mail response.
E-mailing customer service staff is markedly less effective at yielding a satisfactory answer than using an automated online system or phoning a contact centre. Less than half (46 per cent) of the routine customer service questions e-mailed to 100 leading organisations were answered adequately.
The average time to respond to e-mail was nearly 2 days (46 hours), with 28 per cent of organisations not even bothering to reply at all. However proving that fast, accurate responses by email are possible, some companies responded with useful answers within 10 minutes! Overall these figures show a major deterioration since 2006, when e-mail successfully answered 60 per cent of queries and kept customers waiting less time – on average 33 hours - for a reply.
“Our research has uncovered shocking failings in the customer service email channel,” commented Dee Roche, Director of Marketing at Transversal. “Companies are playing ping pong with e-mail enquiries, pushing them back to the web or forcing consumers to call contact centres. What is the point in paying staff to respond to customers’ questions badly?"
“Our analysis demonstrates the scale of this problem and how dramatically the usefulness of e-mail replies has deteriorated over the last three years. Organisations need to take a step back and overhaul their processes to ensure that the e-mail channel is providing what customers want and need,” concluded Roche.
Source: NFP Techno
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