Multichannel Customer Service Largely Lacking: Study

There’s cold comfort if your customers aren’t pleased with their multichannel service experiences: You’re not alone. More than 70% of North American businesses area either below average or poor in their contact center or Web self-service offerings, according to a new study.

EGain, which provides customer service-and-knowledge software, rated companies on their customer service practices. Criteria included choice of communication channels, email response, web self-service, cross-channel consistency, single-channel cross-agent consistency, and phone customer service.

How did the field fare? Seventy one percent 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.

There were a few bright spots, but no one vertical market dominated the customer service field, although retail marketers made a good showing. Broken out by channel, the top performers were:

E-mail customer service: Retail
Web self-service: Retail
Interaction choices: Communications
Phone: Communications
Cross-channel experience: Retail
Cross-agent experience: Consumer goods

EGain conducted its research in late 2009 and early 2010 amid 175 organizations, each of which had annual revenue of more than $250 million. They were culled from the financial services, retail, communications, consumer goods, insurance, healthcare and pharmaceuticals sectors.