When Mike, John and I got together to discuss working on Voice AI, we began with a question:
Do people still use the phone for service and support?
After all, texting, chat, chatbots, etc. have all proliferated for years. Organizations have been investing heavily in “digital” channels with the expectation of lower cost and greater customer satisfaction. What would be the point of improving the phone channel with emerging Artificial Intelligence technology if businesses were winding down their phone-based operations?
Phone calls remain the top option for contacting a business
It didn’t take us long to conclude that the phone remains not only relevant but the most widely used means of communication with customer service. BT found in a 2023 study that 77% of customers use the phone to contact organizations, well over any other means of contact, including text, chat, and email.
Source: BT The Autonomous Customer, 2023
A closer look by BT notes that despite years of heavy investment in alternative digital and self-service channels, this number has risen from 65% in 2020. It’s fair to say that the phone channel is not only relevant but increasingly important when it comes to providing the desired means of communication.
Why do customers use the phone to contact organizations?
Years of experience at OnSIP tell us that there are countless reasons customers opt to call organizations on the phone, many of which are specific to the organization itself. Just recently we heard from a business with a bulk of their phone calls coming from people looking for product support from another company with a similar name. So, basically, this business answers incoming calls only to inform callers they’ve called the wrong business.
While the content of the calls are all over the map, a customer’s choice to make a call vs. send an email or chat on a website is usually based on a need for an immediate resolution. We’ve all been there. We have tried searching through help articles, engaged a rep or bot in chat or tried back and forth emails only to grow increasingly frustrated and anxious for an answer. So, we pick up the phone in hopes of reaching a magical person who has all the answers available at their fingertips. Urgency, and often frustration, is driving the need for an immediate resolution.
Despite the urgency of customer phone calls, organizations are doing a bad job handling them
BT also found in their 2023 study that despite customers’ continued heavy use of the phone as a means of contacting businesses, these organizations are doing a poor job answering the call. Again, while 77% of customers make phone calls, only 32% say they are satisfied with the means of communication. That’s bad!
The reasons behind this poor performance won’t surprise many. To start, people are waiting too long on hold before they can actually talk to a person. BT found that while 60% of customers expect the phone to be answered between 30 seconds and 5 minutes, only 30% experience this. Further 40% have waited more than 10 minutes for their call to be answered. YUCK!
Let’s be honest, we all know why. Organizations desperately want to lower their cost of servicing customers and by far, the greatest cost of customer service is the people staffing phones. The hold times are a simple indication that an organization doesn't have enough people to answer calls urgently. The result is unhappy customers.
Let the people talk now… to Euphonia Voicebots?
As it turns out, we all like to talk. It’s the most natural form of human communication. And despite all of the efforts to move customers away from phone calling, hoping to hire less people to handle calls, the customers are still calling. So what can businesses do? We believe the answer lies in Artificial Intelligence.
Euphonia is on a mission to help organizations “staff” their phones with AI Voicebots. Voicebots can answer calls, talk to customers, resolve inquiries, and more. And they can do it all at scale. What does this mean for a business? It means dramatically reduced cost to handle phone calls, ZERO hold times, a thriving phone based communications channel and clearly happy customers.
Want to try it? Call 1-888-268-9400 to talk to Charlie about La Dolce Vita Pasta.
Want Charlie to answer your calls?