What are the most dreaded customer service calls to make? Do customers enjoy making small talk with support agents, or prefer to get straight to the point? We polled more than 1,200 consumers across the United States to get a pulse on how they are feeling today, when it comes to interacting with customer support teams. We discovered that, in the fast-paced world of today, customer expectations are not being met, frustrations are high, and patience is wearing thin.
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Our Top 5 Findings from The State of Customer Service Report
- Emotional outbursts are common: 14% of customers report having screamed at and 19% have sworn at a company’s representative, while, out of frustration, 61% of people have hung up the phone mid-conversation. This is true on both sides of the equation, as…
- Stress is taking its toll on agents: 73% of consumers have had instances of an agent being rude to them, and 44% have experienced an agent grow agitated
- The desire for instant gratification is real: 39% of consumers have less patience today than they did prior to the pandemic
- Small talk is not necessary: Only 27% of respondents value situations when customer service agents engage in small talk when assisting them, while 73% find no value in such friendly banter, preferring agents to focus on the issue at hand
- Many issues are left unresolved, after a single interaction: 65% of consumers have needed to follow up more than once to get their question resolved, and 25% of respondents reported needing to contact a company three or more times in order to resolve an issue
The bottom line: What does all of this signify?
As the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted consumer behaviors, preferences and expectations, businesses need to evolve amid the changing landscape to meet the needs of the modern consumer. In today’s fast-paced world, the pressure to deliver superior customer experiences is on, big time.
AI-powered chatbots can have an enormous impact on support organizations, and greatly elevate the experience of agents and the customers that they serve, by:
- Swiftly resolving customers’ queries, across channels (such as email, chat, and SMS), for enhanced customer satisfaction and happiness
- Surfacing relevant answers and links to the agents during support calls, transforming them from agents to super-agents
- Automatically resolving repetitive, everyday tickets, offloading mundane work from agents and allowing them to concentrate more on complex tasks
- Working around-the-clock with 24/7 availability, so there are no frustrating hold times for customers
What else do customers have to say? View more insights in Netomi’s The State of Customer Service Report!