News

Study: Multichannel experience dysfunctional

February 22, 2010

eGain Communications Corp., a provider of multichannel customer service and knowledge management software, reported in a news release that more than 70 percent of leading North American enterprise businesses were rated "below average" or "poor" in multichannel customer-service experience.

eGain has been tracking and reporting on the state of customer service in North America and Europe over the last several years through a mystery shopping multichannel research study.

Conducted and compiled in late 2009 and early 2010, eGain's "2010 State of Multichannel Customer Service" research evaluates multiple aspects of Web self-service and contact center customer service of 175 leading enterprises in the United States and Canada, many Fortune 1000 companies among them. All of them had annual revenue of more than $250 million, and are equally distributed across the financial services, retail, communications, consumer goods, insurance, healthcare and pharmaceuticals sectors.

Analysts used a mystery shopping approach to measure customer service performance in six dimensions: choice of communication channels, e-mail response, Web self-service, cross-channel consistency, single-channel cross-agent consistency, and phone customer service. Scores for these metrics were then abstracted to an overall service quotient (SQ), on a scale of 0.0 to 4.0, for each company, as well as for each industry sector and the overall market.

The retail sector ranked first in overall customer service, with an "above average" SQ of 2.3, followed by the communications sector (telecom, cable, satellite and Internet services) with a score of 2.2. Although the overall market remained flat in SQ, these two sectors improved their SQ scores over last year.

SQ for the overall market was "below average" at 1.9 out of 4.0, with half of the companies in the "poor" or "below average" categories. There was only marginal improvement over last year's score of 1.8.

All areas except Web self-service declined in performance, with Web self-service posting a slight increase for the overall market from 1.7 in 2009 to 1.9 in 2010, still "below average."

A shocking 71 percent of the companies received a "poor" or "below average" score in cross-channel customer experience and 42 percent received a "poor" or "below average" rating in the cross-agent experience, measured on the phone channel. The percentage of companies that received a poor cross-channel score went up significantly — from 60 percent in 2009 to 71 percent in 2010. The overall market bordered on "poor" in this metric with a score of 1.0.