The UK lags behind the rest of the world when it comes to customer communication according to a report by Avaya Holdings and Davies Hickman Partners.
Three-quarters of UK consumers have expressed frustration at how difficult it is, when interacting with an organisation, to switch from one means of communication to another without having to start the process over again.
This represents an increase in dissatisfaction of 11 percent since 2015 and outpaces the frustration felt by global consumers (62 percent), showing that the UK lags the world in satisfaction with customer experience in this area.
This finding is just one of the key factors that have led 80 per cent to say organisations should be making customer contact easier.
Avaya and Davies Hickman Partners have been independently tracking the changing customer attitudes when interacting with large organisations since 2010.
The latest research polled 8,000 consumers across Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, the UAE and the UK.
More than 75 percent of UK people thought they wanted an immediate response when dealing with organisations, a trend which helps to explain increasing demand for AI-powered services.
While organisations across a range of sectors have started adopting chatbots, virtual agents and new forms of AI to digitally power their customer service, there are notable differences in how willing UK consumers are to embrace some of the latest channels to communicate with organisations compared to their peers in other markets.
The majority of UK consumers are embracing the growing use of chatbots, with over half saying that they prefer their questions to be answered by chatbot with AI while they are shopping online or using an app. And nearly a third say they would prefer a working chatbot powered by AI to a human customer service agent.
Two-thirds of UK consumers like the idea of using a smart speaker to identify their voice to speed up customer service calls, but only 27 percent of UK consumers would like to actually use their smart speaker to get customer service.
This is almost half of the global average, indicating that UK consumers are more hesitant to adopt the latest technologies organisations are implementing to empower their customers.
The reluctance of UK consumers to adopt new voice and video channels when compared with their global peers appears to be driven in part by wariness of the privacy and security implications.
Marcus Hickman, Co-Founder at Davies Hickman Partners, said: “Our research reveals a number of instances of UK and German consumers showing more conservatism in embracing the latest technology when compared with their global counterparts. For example, two-thirds of UK consumers like the idea of using voice analytics or biometrics, with their voice acting like a fingerprint to authenticate them. But this lags behind international demand from nearly three-quarters of global consumers.”
Ioan MacRae, UK&I Managing Director at Avaya said the report reveals consumers’ growing demand for ‘SuperServe’ organisations – those that go beyond typical levels of service.
