UK Customer Experience Worsening as Social Media Performance Slumps

Reading, November 2017, UK brands are struggling to cope with a rising volume of queries and growing consumer expectations, according to the Eptica Multichannel Customer Conversation Study, which was released today. The 100 UK companies surveyed could only answer 44% of routine questions asked on the web, email, Twitter and Facebook, down from 49% in 2016.

Social media saw the biggest fall, potentially driven by its increasing use by consumers as a customer service channel. Just 34% of tweets and 35% of Facebook messages received a successful answer, despite 94% of companies advertising their Twitter handles, and 89% having Facebook pages. Performance has dropped substantially – in 2016 48% of tweets and 45% of Facebook messages received an accurate response.

Conducted since 2012 by digital customer experience software provider Eptica, and designed to test real-world performance, the Eptica Multichannel Customer Conversation Study evaluated 100 leading UK brands from the insurance, banking, travel, telecoms, utility, electronics manufacturing, fashion, consumer electronics retail, food and drink retail and entertainment sectors, 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, Facebook and chat.

As the table below shows, on the positive side, the web, email and chat channels all saw improvements in both accuracy and speed.