Customer Service

Retail customers ignored during 2022 holiday season

Adobe Stock

February 9, 2023

Nearly a third of retailers, 28.5%, turned off live chat during the 2022 Black Friday to Cyber Monday weekend, and 40% of pre-sale emails sent to brands by consumers went unanswered — an increased from 30% in 2021 and 27% in 2020.

Those actions led to "major faults in digital customer experience," according to a study from Simplr, "The 2023 State of Ecommerce Customer Service Report."

The study polled consumers on digital interactions across more than 400 top consumer brands, according to a press release.

"Turning off live chat before Black Friday is akin to firing your in-store retail sales associates on Thanksgiving Day. It's a self-destructive move that hurts both short-term sales revenues and long-term customer loyalty," Daniel Rodriguez, Simplr CMO, said in the release. "But due to being unprepared in their internal processes and unconfident in their outsourced BPOs to handle the surge in digital inquiries, many brands, unfortunately, felt like they needed to do it."

According to Forrester's U.S. 2022 Customer Experience Index rankings, "CX quality fell for 19% of brands in 2022 — the highest proportion of brands to drop in one year since the inception of the survey." A prior 2022 study from Simplr also found that only 24% of businesses in certain industries are producing "exceptional" end-to-end customer experiences, according to the release.

"The delta between consumer expectations and what brands could provide in terms of CX continued to increase in 2022, resulting in brands appearing to be even more unprepared when it came to the holiday shopping season than they were in 2021 and 2020," Rodriguez said in the release. "At a time when consumers are already stressed and overwhelmed, poor CX can be calamitous for brands, which, sadly we saw over the holidays."

The study revealed that the vast majority of consumer-facing chatbots failed to live up to expectations over the holiday season. Among the 400-plus brands studied for the survey, 71% had chatbots implemented which could not understand the initial question posed by a consumer. And 36% of chatbots required customers to repeat themselves more than two times.