A recent report by Vonage found the possibility for huge improvements to customer satisfaction with only 45% of consumers stating that they are “very satisfied” with the way in which they connect with companies.
The results of Vonage’s 11th Annual Global Customer Engagement Report open the door to digital transformation opportunities via artificial intelligence, omnichannel communications, and other innovations.
In spite of a digital transformation drive over the past couple of years, gaps in technology are hampering the potential for meaningful interactions between customers and businesses.
Joy Corso, Chief Marketing Officer for Vonage, said: “The ubiquity of mobile phones delivers the kind of vehicle to businesses that allows them to speak to and engage with their customers directly — right from the palms of their hands.
“Yet, this research reveals that many businesses are still not using the communications channels made available by today’s technology to their full potential and are missing out on opportunities to make real connections with customers and drive customer engagement.
“This is where AI tools can help and surface as underused technology.”
Personal communications scored more highly with 60% of customers being “very satisfied” with their communications with family and friends, compared with only 45% feeling the same way about communications with businesses and service providers.
While the most popular means of contacting friends and family are messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger (57%) and calls via messaging apps (48%), the most common means of contacting businesses is via phone calls (37%), email (30%), and messaging apps (30%).
The differences between the satisfaction levels and means of communication between personal and business interactions imply businesses need to align themselves more closely with personal communications channels. One way for companies to achieve this is by implementing omnichannel solutions, which can include video, voice, messaging apps, chat, and more. Artificial intelligence can also be harnessed to improve customer, as well as employee, experience.
AI tools which can be used include virtual assistants, which can deal with basic customer enquiries to help reduce the wait time for customers and the workload for employees. This provides businesses with a customer triage system that is particularly useful during peak times. Conversational commerce is another AI tool which engages customers in-channel, providing information and self-service options such as FAQs, payment authorisations and user authentications.
Customer Grievances
The top customer grievances in creating positive connections with businesses include long wait times to speak to customer support agents (63%), needing to call for support multiple times (63%), repeatedly experiencing the same issue (61%), and long automated phone menus (57%).
Half of those surveyed said they are likely to switch businesses or service providers after only one or two frustrating experiences. This means there is real-time pressure for businesses to respond to these grievances and avoid losing customers.
Again, AI is a means of mitigating many of these pitfalls in customer service. As well as virtual assistants and conversational commerce, companies could implement voice bots, automated business phone systems, interactive voice response systems (IVRs), and more.
Purchasing Preferences
When it comes to purchasing preferences, respondents ranked their preferred purchasing channels with physical in-store transactions being the number one option (45%). Ecommerce (39%), phone calls (38%), and email (36%) were the next most popular means of purchasing products.
Web chat was generally perceived as a way of asking questions and dealing with transaction issues, as opposed to being a primary vehicle of transactions themselves. It may help businesses, therefore, to position themselves with these findings by, for example, investing in an effective web chat solution which focuses on resolving customer issues.
Regional Insights
The report found regional variations in consumer satisfaction, however, the chasm between personal engagement and business engagement remained the same.
Latin America has the greatest difference in personal versus business communication results with 83% reportedly using messaging apps to contact friends and family, 77% using phone-call apps, and 64% using social media messaging. Only 50% contact businesses via messaging apps, 49% use phone-call apps, and 46% use social media messaging.
In North America, SMS is a popular option (67%) between family and friends, compared to only 33% usage with businesses.
In the UK, mobile phone calls are only at 46% and email is used 37% of the time for personal communications but the figures are even lower for business comms with mobile phones being used 24% of the time and email being used a reported 20% of the time.
Overall in Asia Pacific, personal usage for messaging (48%) and phone calls (47%) is markedly higher than connecting with businesses via messaging apps (31%) and phone calls (32%).
Corso continued: “The pandemic made the call for digital transformation louder than ever before. Whether it’s messaging, chat, video, or AI-powered conversational commerce, consumers expect to connect with brands in the same way they connect in their personal lives — through whatever channel they are in and where they are most comfortable.
“There is a tremendous opportunity for businesses here. Quite simply, businesses should be communicating more like family and friends. That is the experience that will drive customer engagement and keep customers coming back.”
Vonage’s 11th Global Customer Engagement Report surveyed around 5,000 consumers from 11 countries, exploring their technological preferences when connecting with their favourite brands.
Vonage specialises in digital transformation for businesses, providing unified communications, contact centre, and conversational commerce applications. Its communications platform can integrate video, voice, messaging, chat, verification, and AI into existing workflows.
The company was recently accepted into the Amazon Web Services Independent Software Vendor Accelerate Program.
Ericsson acquired Vonage in July this year for $6.2bn. UC Today spoke to Zeus Karravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, to find out why Ericsson decided to make this acquisition.