About a fortnight ago, on our poll, we asked you all a question on support channels used by your customers. Before we get to the results, let’s also see a few myths.
Myth 1: Email is so passe. It’s a thing of the 90s. Customers don’t use it much.
Reality: About 88% of respondents in our poll said that email was a channel that their customers used to reach them.
Myth 2: Social Media is the place for customer support. It has become mainstream channel.
Reality: Although social media is very very important, it’s not the mainstream channel for customer support yet.
Myth 3: The fewer channels, the more efficiently the helpdesk performance.
Reality: By automating a few tasks and setting up some notifications, you can have as many channels as you want and still operate very efficiently.
There are two key insights from the poll results. The first one is about number of channels.
About 73% of respondents said customers use more than one channel to reach them. Around 46% of respondents said customers use three or more channels to reach them. This goes on to show how helpdesk software can make it really easy to handle so many channels efficiently. If they had to handle each of these channels using different software, it would’ve taken a miracle to make things happen so well everyday! So, if you’re a business handling just one or two channels, this would be a good time to try Zoho Support! 😉
The second key insight from this poll is about which channels enjoy widespread adoption.
Contrary to popular perception, email is still the most widely used customer support channel. And, it’s definitely here to stay. About 88% of respondents chose email as one channel, in their response. ‘Phone’ came second, with about 70% of respondents to its support.
Web forms and customer self-service portal come (a really close!) third and fourth respectively. Over 35% of respondents chose web forms while about 34% of respondents chose self-service portal. Most businesses use these two channels quite interchangeably.
Live chat was chosen by over 24% of respondents, while social media was chosen as a channel by about 20% of respondents.
If you’re thinking about taking up some new support channels, you might want to check out this post from our blog.
We’ll return next week with another interesting question. Have a great weekend!
Hi Miguel, You're absolutely right! One way in which businesses decide what channels to offer is by looking at what tools they have and what channels they're comfortable with. Although this isn't wrong, there's a chance that it might not work out well enough for the customer. Given that helpdesk software, like Zoho Support, are available, businesses can take advantage of that and do what's best for their customers.
Hi Prashanth:
I think one way of interpreting these results is that people prefer the tools at hand against some effort involved for support.
Currently these tools are the email and phone.
This means that what we have to do, is to put handly the channel we want our customer look us for support.