Retailers learned long ago that providing answers to common shopper questions on their websites was an effective way to head off phone calls and keep a shopper moving toward a purchase. That job continues to be a work in progress for both websites and call centers, according to recent survey assessing consumer ease of getting answers to questions.
Of 5,000 consumers surveyed earlier this year, 40% identified online retailers as providing low “findability” of answers to shoppers’ questions. Bank websites fared only slightly better with 36% of respondents critical of the path to answers to questions about products and other customer service questions. Even technology company websites, the top performers in terms of making it easy for consumers to locate answers, come up short in the view of 27% of respondents.
The survey, “The Biggest Pain Points of Customer Service Journeys,” was conducted by Forrester Research Inc. and commissioned by eGain, a provider of customer engagement applications for retailers and other companies through a cloud-based, or web-based, service model. Respondents answered questions about the worst aspects of getting help from customer service contact centers and websites. The survey, results of which were released last week, covered a range of industries: retail, communication service providers, banking and financial services, property and casualty insurance, health insurance, health care providers, utilities and government.
Customer service agents who didn’t know the answers to questions was another key complaint among consumers. Online retailer agents were not up to speed according to 31% of respondents, but customer service agents working for offline stores came off worse: 47% of respondents noted that those retailers, along with technology providers (47%), were clueless. Even the best-performing sector, property, casualty and life insurance companies, had 25% of consumers complaining about this issue.
Perhaps least surprising: Younger consumers have higher expectations of live agents than older shoppers. 40% of Generation Y consumers, those born in the 1980s and 1990s, did not find customer service agents to be knowledgeable across all industries, compared with only 23% of seniors.