Report: 48 Percent of Consumers Abandon Business After Bad Customer Service
Nearly half (48 percent) of US consumers surveyed in a new report by Corvisa said that they have stopped doing business with a company due to negative customer service experiences. Millennials are even less tolerant of bad customer service with nearly one-quarter reporting to take their business elsewhere with just one negative interaction.
Call center software and cloud communications provider Corvisa launched its third annual Customer Service Report on Thursday, which included responses from over 1,000 consumers in the US. It found that long hold times, scripted-sounding agents and a lack of proactivity were key customer service pain points.
Despite the availability of other methods of customer service communication, phone calls still reign supreme with 41 percent of customers preferring phones to other communication methods with customer service.
“It’s hard for agents to convey empathy with the customer when every word is pre-planned, so most companies are actually more successful when they move away from the ‘stick-to the-scripts’ mentality,” Brandon Knight, vice president contact center optimization for Corvisa said in a statement. “A more effective approach is to instill general conversation guidelines and workflows so that agents can collect specific information and then communicate in a more authentic way.”
Nearly all of the respondents to Corvisa’s survey said that customer service agents sound scripted at times, and 25 percent said training agents to sound more natural should be a key priority for businesses.
Long wait times are another huge customer service issue, according to the report, as 78 percent of respondents said they would hang up if they had to wait more than 15 minutes. One-quarter of respondents would give up in five minutes or less. Slashing hold times is an area where 57 percent of respondents believe businesses could improve, up 16 percent from last year’s report.