Longer customer service wait times, due to Covid-19, causing phone calls to fade out and text to grow in adoption
A study by Quiq, a conversational messaging platform and Sapio Research, found that Covid-19 has accelerated the use of messaging in the contact center, with messaging channels set to overtake the phone call in 3-5 years. The State of Digital Conversations in Customer Support 2021 said that 50% of respondents plan to adopt new technology to address the increase.
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Customer service decision makers experienced a spike in inbound customer queries as a result of the pandemic, with 2 in 5 citing an increase of 51-100%, and have turned to technology, such as messaging, to remedy the resulting longer wait times and improve the customer experience. Accordingly, 37% of respondents expect messaging channels, such as text and social media DMs, to overtake phone calls as the preferred method of communicating with brands in 3-5 years. Half of brands said that messaging channels play an increasing role in their communications strategy.
“A reliance on phone calls for customer service is causing unsatisfactory wait times, since it’s very difficult to scale phone agents to meet the demand,” said Mike Myer, CEO of Quiq. “The long-term consequences will drag on brands. As more and more retail heads online, and consumers shift to text communication, brands are finding that messaging is a convenient and cost effective way to service customers at scale.”
92% of those surveyed said that Covid-19 has increased customer service response times, with 80% of those impacted believing these longer response times will have a negative impact on their brand. Thirty-one percent believe this impact to be “significant.”
Only 28% of businesses think that phone calls will be the preferred method of customer communication in the near future. Instead, half of respondents said that Facebook was important to their strategy; followed by text (50%); Instagram (32%); and Whatsapp (32%).
Smartphone messaging applications are also playing an increasingly large role in their communications strategy (45%), with 49% of corporate directors saying that messaging applications are a top priority.
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