Survey Reveals Greater Challenges in Meeting Customer Needs as Consumers Indicate they are Creating More Interactions across More Channels

According to a new survey by NICE, consumers are more empowered than ever before as they are communicating more often and using multiple channels to contact an enterprise. Consumers indicate that on average they are using six different channels for contacting service providers, while 86 percent note that on average, they are communicating more often, or at the same level, with businesses over all channels.

The Web continues to be the most popular and growing self-service channel, while smartphone applications and social networks have grown in popularity with more than 40 percent of respondents noting that they have increased their use of these channels.

Almost half of the respondents noted that if they are unable to accomplish a task on a company website, they will then turn to the contact center to resolve their issue. This is often due to the fact that respondents find complex tasks difficult to complete via the web self-service channel. As self-service channels are more often used for easier tasks, the contact center continues to evolve to "Tier 2" status, for taking care of escalated service requests.

Customer expectations are high as 40 percent of respondents want the live representative to already know about their experience before beginning their conversation in order to bring the issue to a quick and successful conclusion.

Some other key findings:

-- Within Financial Services, only 50% of customers indicated satisfaction in their interactions with a live phone representative. However, greater satisfaction was reported among respondents in the other verticals – here, 81% expressed satisfaction with the live rep channel.

-- The use of all interaction channels is growing, especially in the travel/hospitality and insurance sector. The healthcare industry lags behind in multi-channel service, and many of the advanced channels (e.g., social networks, smart phone applications) are still not prevalent. Healthcare customers prefer to use service centers (85%).

-- The use of smartphone apps and SMS is on the rise (34%), with the strongest growth in the financial services sector (46%) and the travel sector (38%). FSI customers are substantially more successful (52%) and satisfied with smart phone apps than users in other industries (34% use this channel successfully).

-- The role of IVR remains unclear; survey results indicate a failure to contain interactions and a significant negative impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty. One of the biggest motivators to use IVR is to get to a live representative who is aware of their IVR journey, or to use the callback option. Regardless of the vertical, around 60% of the respondents indicated that they try to bypass the IVR to get to a live representative.

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