Dive Brief:
- When automated support fails to handle a customer service issue, more than one-third of U.S. consumers lose trust in a brand — even if a human resolves it later, according to a Liveops survey.
- When handoffs do happen, the process has room for improvement. Only 10% of consumers say handoffs from automated support to a live agent are always smooth, while 38% say they are often smooth, and 42% say they are sometimes smooth, according to the survey of 1,000 consumers released last week.
- The largest problem consumers have with handoffs is that they have to explain the issue again, followed by a human representative not having their previous information and a representative asking customers to repeat security or account details.
Dive Insight:
Consumers feel dissatisfied with handoffs, but they still expect the option to shift from automated customer support to a human agent. Brands that get the handoff wrong, or fail to offer it at all, are putting trust at risk.
Nearly all consumers — 93% — say it’s very important or extremely important to have a clear, easy way to reach a human, according to Liveops. No respondents said that access is not very important or not important at all.
The lesson is that human support should always be at hand, Julie Geller, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group. Brands should do their best to facilitate AI and other forms of automation to fulfill tasks and minimize the need for escalation, but that doesn’t mean handoffs disappear entirely.
“I think we’ve learned from early attempts at customer service integrating AI into live customer support that we don’t want to eliminate the need for a handoff entirely,” Geller said in an email. “The more complete the transaction, the less likely a handoff becomes necessary. At the same time, customers should never feel trapped.”
The best customer service operations combine capable self-service with transparent access to human agents, according to Geller. When customers know they have access to human support but never need to use it, their trust in the brand’s customer support grows.
This is in line with Liveops’ survey, which found that nearly 9 in 10 consumers trust a brand more when they can easily switch from automated support to a person.
