The survey was conducted by Corizon, which supplies an Enterprise Mashup Platform to businesses and contact centres. This platform transforms the economics of desktop applications.
Corizon polled 2,127 consumers via YouGov, and carried out a simultaneous survey of 90 contact centre managers in England, Wales and Scotland, to find out about the contact channels they handled – and how they handled those channels.
When asked how they would contact a company for customer, billing or support enquiries, consumers chose across a range of eight contact channels. Phone was the most popular channel, selected by 75% of respondents, followed by email (70%), web self-service (43%), letter (31%), social media such as Twitter or Facebook (4%), fax (3%) and SMS (3%).
When asked which contact channels they supported, the responses from contact centre managers showed that phone was the most popular medium, with 100 per cent support for phone queries. 96% had email support, 90% handled customer requests by letter, 65% offered web self-service, 27% supported SMS requests, 20% handled social media such as Twitter, online forums or Facebook, and 11% offered IM and online chat support.