Warc, 3 July 2014
READING: UK retailers are failing to offer consistent
information and service across multiple channels according to a new study which
found that just 13% provided similar answers to the same question.
For its Multichannel Customer Experience Study, Eptica, a
supplier of customer interaction management software, evaluated 40 leading UK
retailers – split between the four sectors of food & wine, consumer
electronics, entertainment and fashion – measuring them on their ability to
provide answers to ten routine questions via the web as well as their speed and
accuracy when responding to email, Twitter and web chat.
As well as an inability to deliver the same response across
channels there were some startling differences in the timing of replies, as
Eptica reported one electronics retailer answering an email in seven minutes
but taking 76 hours to reply to the same question on Twitter.
"The retail sector has been revolutionised by the
expansion of digital channels, meaning retailers have to answer more questions,
across more channels, than ever before," said Olivier Njamfa, CEO and
Co-founder, Eptica. "However, our study shows that, while some retailers
are leading the way, many are failing to deliver fast, accurate responses and
consistency across channels."
Email was the best performing channel for retail service,
with 63% of questions answered, ahead of websites, which successfully provided
answers to 60% of routine queries. Twitter brought up the rear, with just 33%
of queries answered effectively.
Social media is often seen as being a good customer service
platform and 83% of the retailers in the sample were on Twitter, but their
responses varied widely, with fashion retailers by far the best at answering
questions – 70% were answered and 65% were successful. Entertainment retailers
were poor performers in this regard, with just 10% tweets answered, although,
on the upside, all of these were successful.
The greatest disparity was evident in food & wine, where
60% of tweet were answered but just 25% were answered successfully.
The average Twitter response time was 13 hours 10 minutes,
but removing the outlier already mentioned halved this figure to 6 hours 44
minutes.
There is huge value in social media for those brands that
can get customer service right. Joanna Howard, Head of Customer Service at BT,
explained to a conference last year how the UK telecoms business had used
social media – and especially Twitter – to save £2m a year, reducing churn and
engaging with millions of users across the country.
Data sourced from RealWire; additional content by Warc staff
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