Steve Morrell on What Your Customers Really Want When They Contact You

The 2022-23 Australia and New Zealand Contact Centre Decision-Makers’ Guide is ContactBabel’s second annual research study of the performance, technology and HR aspects of Australian and New Zealand contact centre operations. The research is based on surveys with 112 senior contact centre and CX decision-makers, as well as 2,000 ANZ consumers.

Part of the research was to understand what customer channels of preference would be in cases of high emotion, urgency and complexity:

• High emotion interactions: 28% of Australian customers would choose email; 23% telephone; 14% would visit the store or branch (older people were more likely to use the phone)
• High urgency interactions: 31% telephone; 30% web self-service; 9% email (older people prefer to use self-service or phone, with younger people more receptive to web chat or social media)
• High complexity interactions: 34% telephone; 20% visit the store or branch; 14% email (older people are more likely to make a physical visit to a business).

The findings show that the same customer may prefer to use a different channel depending on what they are trying to achieve, and also that while telephony is broadly seen as the ‘gold standard’, many customers may try digital channels – whether live or self-service – as a matter of preference.

Australian consumers were also asked to state which were the top three most important factors to them when contacting an organisation.

Australian customers were far more likely to value speaking with Australia-based agents, with 51% of customers stating that this was a top 3 CX factor for them. However, only 17% of businesses had thought that this would be the case. This is a similar finding to our US and UK contact centre research.

First-contact resolution was the second most important factor, with short queue / wait times and polite, friendly employees also being seen as important. These factors align with what Australian businesses expected their customers to value, and it is positive to see that most businesses seem to understand what their customers want when contacting them.

The full report is available free of charge from “The 2022-23 Australia and New Zealand Contact Centre Decision-Makers’ Guide.

Written by Steve Morrell, Managing Director, ContactBabel Ltd