With the explosive growth of Twitter and
other social media channels over the last few years, email has come to
be regarded as a ‘second-class’ service, according to new research.
Just as with social media, customers
expect increasingly rapid and efficient responses to email enquiries,
but a survey of Call Centre Association members by customer service
specialist KANA Software shows that 59 percent or organisations
currently take more than eight hours – or one full working day – to
provide a response.
The time delay is even greater in some
businesses, with more than one quarter (26.5 per cent) taking 24 hours
or more to reply to customers.
By contrast, the average response time
on Twitter is 5.1 hours, with 10 percent of companies answering within
one hour, according to a recent report by social media analytics company
Simply Measured
Slow response rates can lead to customer
disaffection, or even defection, as well as the potential for damage to
brand reputation if service delays or failings become public via the
very same social networks.
Part of the problem, according to KANA,
is that companies assume customers are shifting all their activity to
social media, whereas in reality many customers still want to keep using
email and continue to do so in significant volume.
A further KANA study reported that the
most common channel for complaining to a company was email (42 percent)
followed closely by phone (36 percent), and it is predicted that email
accounts will grow from 4.1 billion in 2011 to 5.1 billion in 2015.
KANA said that campanies can improve
their email management by investing in intelligent technology solutions
that automate and assign email responses and help indentify responses to
complex customer inquiries.
“Organisations must remain aware of the
continued role email plays within customer service,” said Steven
Thurlow, head of product strategy for KANA Software.
“Social customer service is very much
the ‘now,’ yet the vast majority of customers still, and will for the
foreseeable future, chose to interact with organisations via email. It
need not become a second-class citizen to more modern digital channels
but, rather, email can fill a dedicated role within robust and highly
responsive customer service strategies.”
—telegraph.co.uk
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