Multichannel experience most dysfunctional aspect of customer service, according to new North America research study

Online, February 23, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Mountain View, Calif. (February 23, 2010): eGain Communications Corporation (OTC BB: EGAN.OB), the leading provider of multichannel customer service and knowledge management software for on-site or on-demand deployment, reported that over 70% of leading North American enterprise businesses were rated "below average" or "poor" in multichannel customer service experience.
eGain has been tracking and reporting on the state of customer service in North America and Europe over the last several years through the industry's most comprehensive mystery-shopping multichannel research study. This research provides a holistic assessment of the state of multichannel customer experience within and across phone and eService channels.
"The customer experience, at every interaction, affects future revenue and profit. Customer experience optimization, therefore, ensures that such customer experiences across channels reinforce the organization's basic brand value proposition, and differentiate its business," said Johan Jacobs, Research Director at Gartner in his research note "Ten Imperatives for Optimizing the Multichannel Management Customer Experience", dated October 30, 2009.
Conducted and compiled in late 2009 and early 2010, eGain's "2010 State of Multichannel Customer Service" research evaluates multiple aspects of web self-service and contact center customer service of 175 leading enterprises in the U.S. and Canada, many Fortune 1000 companies among them. All of them had an annual revenue of more than $250 million, and are equally distributed across the financial services, retail, communications, consumer goods, insurance, healthcare and pharmaceuticals sectors.
Analysts used a "mystery shopping" approach to measure customer service performance in six dimensions: choice of communication channels, email response, web self-service, cross-channel consistency, single-channel cross-agent consistency, and phone customer service*. Scores for these metrics were then abstracted to an overall Service Quotient (SQ), on a scale of 0.0 to 4.0, for each company, as well as for each industry sector and the overall market.
eGain media contact
Jamie Abayan
Phone: 650-230-7532
Email: [email protected]