As consumers, we have high expectations from the companies we choose to give our business to. Sometimes we want a personal touch — other times we just want the fastest way to an answer or action. A growing number of channels have emerged in recent years beyond traditional stores, snail mail and call centers. Consumers have a wide array of new quick, convenient ways to interact with companies for a variety of purposes. But what do consumers' want? Are there certain actions that drive consumers to specific channels? Is their interaction based on the type of company they're contacting?

We recently conducted an online survey to try to answer these questions. Participants were given several options to choose from to indicate their preferred method of interaction for completing various service tasks, across industries like telecom, financial services and utilities.
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The online survey was distributed to a large group of consumers across age groups and geographical regions. Analysis of the responses delivered insight into today's true customer needs and preferences.

The survey shows that consumers overwhelmingly prefer to interact with companies through websites, especially when it comes to simple, repetitive tasks like paying bills. The web is also becoming the preferred channel for informational transactions, like checking account status, which don't require live assistance, where between 40 percent and 80 percent of customers indicated using the web.

These findings aren't surprising given the massive adoption of websites for more convenient and quick research, purchasing and communicating. Companies have been investing in optimizing their websites to continue to encourage their customers to find the answers they are looking for online. The web has become an increasingly user-friendly and easy way for customers to self-serve without the time and effort associated with live interactions, empowering them to be in charge of their accounts and time.

But what happens with more complex interaction types? In cases where customers are trying to make account changes, get technical help or report service outages, they will try to reach a live service agent between 40 percent and 70 percent of the time. This is especially clear in the insurance industry, where live service agents beat out the web channel in all categories except for bill pay. Making a claim with an insurance provider is the highest among all survey questions, coming in at over 82 percent. This is followed closely by customers disputing or inquiring about a bill from their healthcare provider, coming in at 81 percent.

Once again, these results are understandable given the delicate nature of these types of interactions. These are less informational and usually require some sort of resolution from the customer. There is however a tremendous opportunity here for both the web channel as well as the IVR (Interactive Voice Response) channel to capture some of the live agent traffic. The utility industry has made significant strides with new IVR outage reporting applications to proactively notify and update customers on service status, thereby containing callers in self-service through keeping them informed at every step. These improvements have brought the IVR usage for these types of interactions to almost 24 percent, which is the highest use IVR in the entire survey. This is followed by checking free or used minutes with a wireless provider which is almost 22 percent of the responses.

Two channels that are used less often are email and retail/branch locations. Email is perhaps not as mature as a self-service channel and the interaction eventually requires a live person to read and answer an email request, therefore driving slower response and resolution times, and making it an expensive channel to operate.

Branches and retail locations are also not a high preference for most customers unless they need to deposit (40 percent) or transfer funds (9 percent) at a bank or get technical help from a wireless provider (6 percent). When depositing funds at a bank the branches are losing ground to ATM deposits (32.5 percent) and websites (24 percent). Certain banks have found a way to allow their more technical customers to make deposits by scanning the checks at home and then uploading the images through their websites. This is a great example of empowering your customers to use whatever method they deem to be the fastest and easiest for them to use.

The complete report is available for download from ClickFox. Photo by Larry Vincent.