eGain Communications Corporation, a provider of multichannel customer service and knowledge management software, reported that over 70% of leading North American enterprise businesses were rated “below average” or “poor” in multichannel customer service experience.
eGain has been tracking and reporting on the state of customer service in North America and Europe over the last several years through the industry’s most comprehensive mystery-shopping multichannel research study. This research provides a holistic assessment of the state of multichannel customer experience within and across phone and eService channels.
Analysts used a “mystery shopping” approach to measure customer service performance in six dimensions: choice of communication channels, email response, web self-service, cross-channel consistency, single-channel cross-agent consistency, and phone customer service*. Scores for these metrics were then abstracted to an overall Service Quotient (SQ), on a scale of 0.0 (worst) to 4.0 (best), for each company, as well as for each industry sector and the overall market.
Key findings
- The retail sector ranked first in overall customer service, with an “above average” SQ of 2.3, followed by the communications sector (telecom, cable, satellite and Internet services) with a score of 2.2. Although the overall market remained flat in SQ, these two sectors improved their SQ scores over last year.
- SQ for the overall market was “below average” at 1.9 out of 4.0, with half of the companies in the “poor” or “below average” categories. There was only marginal improvement over last year’s score of 1.8.
- All areas except web self-service declined in performance, with web self-service posting a slight increase for the overall market from 1.7 in 2009 to 1.9 in 2010, still “below average”.
- A shocking 71% of the companies received a “poor” or “below average” score in cross-channel customer experience and 42% received a “poor” or “below average” rating in the cross-agent experience, measured on the phone channel. The percentage of companies that received a poor cross-channel score went up significantly—from 60% in 2009 to 71% in 2010. The overall market bordered on “poor” in this metric with a score of 1.0.
Top performing sectors in specific aspects of customer service are:
* Email customer service: Retail
* Web self-service: Retail
* Interaction choices: Communications
* Phone: Communications
* Cross-channel experience: Retail
* Cross-agent experience: Consumer goods
More information on the service and support industry can be found at www.SupportIndustry.com
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