New CX Act Customer Service Touchpoint Study Shows Most National Brands Falter Significantly on Digital, Social Media Engagement
Rosslyn, Va. (PRWEB) May 28, 2014 -- Phone Outperforms All Other Channels in Areas of Issue Resolution & Satisfaction
Only 52% of Testers Find Customer Care Information Easy to Find
Customer Service Has Huge Impact on Bottom-Line: Negative Experience Results in Only 0% to 12% Likelihood to Buy Across Channels
CX Act, Inc. – a leading customer experience improvement firm – today released the latest in a series of studies that examines and evaluates core customer service channels offered by leading brands, and further assesses how these companies are handling and resolving consumer inquiries and issues in a customer service framework.
CX Act’s Customer Touchpoint Stress Test is a comprehensive snapshot of the customer experience across multiple service channels – phone, email, chat, and social media – involving 50 of the world’s most prominent brands in various marketplace categories. These include: airlines, auto manufacturers, financial, consumer electronics, consumer packaged goods, insurance, cable/internet, retailers, and supermarkets – all of which invest heavily in digital marketing.
Social Lens Research conducted the study by recruiting a pool of existing customers to test responsiveness on day-to-day customer experience issues such as billing questions, product issues, and general inquiries. Customers followed a testing script asking them to document their experience in detail.
The key goals of the study were to compare service delivery and customer satisfaction on delivery and response across touchpoints, and to identify opportunities for improvement that would positively impact ROI and the bottom-line.
“Our ‘stress test’ study of brands and the consumers they serve shows in startling terms that most companies are surprisingly inconsistent when it comes to providing comprehensive and quality customer experiences,” said Crystal Collier, CEO, CX Act. “Consistency is markedly absent in both variety of offerings and the quality of those channels. It’s also clear that exceptional customer service via phone does not translate to digital channels – such as email, chat, and social networks. With more consumers turning to digital for customer service, especially with young consumers, brands need to take steps now to offer higher quality service via digital.”
Top Touchpoint Study Findings
• Phone outperformed all channels on issue resolution at 86%, yet only 58% were very satisfied with service
• Customer experiences were inconsistent, and being a top performer on phone service did not translate to high satisfaction scores on chat (40%), email (22%), or on Facebook (17%)
• Only 20 of 50 brands tested offered chat; even when chat was offered, quality of service was rated low, with one in three testers failing to reach resolution; however, for those who were successful, time to resolution was fastest among all channels at 9 minutes
• Only half of the tested companies offered email as a customer service channel, with only one in four companies offering a Facebook channel for customer inquiries
• Ease of use continues to be a surprising challenge for brands serving customers: only 52% said customer care information was easy to find on company websites – and when they did, only one in four (24%) found it extremely helpful
• Of most concern to brands is the impact of customer engagement on the key ROI metric of “likelihood to buy”: when customers had positive experiences, likelihood to purchase across channels ranged from 88% to 100%; but in negative experiences, likely to purchase plummeted – ranging from 0%-12%.
For a summary of the CX Act Customer Touchpoint Stress Test study, please visit http://www.cxact.com/touchpointstresstest. This study is one of a continuing series of CX studies being conducted by CX Act; to access the first study from March 2014, “TouchPoints: Personal Presence Trumps Digital Decorum for Optimal Customer Experience”, please visit http://www.cxact.com/touchpoint.
About CX Act, Inc.
CX Act, formerly TARP Worldwide, has been helping companies improve their customer experience for more than 40 years. CX Act pioneered the science of quantifying, managing, and optimizing the customer experience and has been a leader in the CX market since 1971. Today, through our innovative research, technology, and customer interaction programs, we continue to set the standard to improve our clients' customer service performance, customer value, and "The Profit of Interaction™." Our clients see a measurable improvement in their key customer metrics and a positive return on their CX investment. CX Act serves corporations in all major industries, leading associations, and government entities. Our experience is customer experience. Visit us at http://www.cxact.com for more information.
About Social Lens Research
Social Lens Research, based in Washington D.C., helps companies make research a more social experience. It creates engaging research experiences that are social and mobile to better understand hard-to-reach audiences. Our proprietary social influencer panel makes it easy to find and manage social media influencers who serve both as participants and recruiters for our research projects - allowing us to efficiently recruit niche, hard to reach, and high quality participants. Lens has worked with various organizations, including Google, Consumer Reports, Cabot Cheese, Mobile Future, Mobomo, and MocoSpace. Its research has been published in various publications, including eMarketer, Mobile Commerce Daily, the Greenbook blog, and Portada. For more information, visit: http://www.sociallensresearch.com.
Nicholas Graham, CX Act, http://www.cxact.com, +1 571-291-2967, [email protected]
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