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Vonage: Businesses Must Become Agile, Adapt Quickly to Pandemic-Related Changes in Customer Preferences to Enhance Connections
22 Oct, 2020
New Survey Reveals Emerging Communications Channels, Changing Consumer Behaviours in the COVID era
Findings Show Video Chat Up 43%, SMS Down 23% as Consumer Preferences for Communicating with Business and Service Providers Evolve
LONDON-- --Vonage (Nasdaq: VG), a global leader in cloud communications helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation, today released a new report—" COVID-19 Reshapes the Global Customer Engagement Landscape"—detailing changing consumer preferences and behaviours and how businesses and service providers need to transform their customer engagement strategies to become more agile and adapt to changes driven by the COVID era. This report follows the January 2020 Vonage Global Customer Engagement Report, and captures unique insight about consumer communications preferences in the age of COVID-19 compared to pre-COVID preferences. Key findings demonstrate that the pandemic accelerated the adoption of newer communications channels while increasing fragmentation in channel preferences, especially in the ways that consumers interact with businesses and service providers. "COVID-19 has upended how businesses operate and how consumers interact with those businesses," said Joy Corso, Chief Marketing Officer for Vonage. "We conducted research to understand changing consumer preferences and behaviours to help organisations better engage with their customers to drive better experiences." Corso continued, “We are at the beginning of a huge market-wide communications revolution. If there was ever a question that businesses needed to digitally transform not only to survive but thrive, COVID-19 eliminated any doubt. This is a secular change in how business gets done. This survey underscores the fact that it is now fundamental for companies to stay connected to employees and customers from anywhere – through whatever channel they choose – video, voice, messaging, and chat.” Video Continues to Reign Supreme To connect with consumers today, businesses must turn to less traditional channels and employ technology, such as APIs, that allow them the flexibility to embed programmable capabilities - voice, video, messaging and verification - directly into existing applications and workflows. Since January, globally, there has been 140% growth in the number of people who prefer to connect with businesses via video. Video chat has also become a mainstream addition to people’s everyday lives, and U.S. adoption has experienced four years of growth in just seven months, with 43% of Americans now video chatting with businesses regularly, up from 28% in January. Across all regions, 55% of consumers have used video to connect with businesses and service providers, up from 44% in January.- In Latin America, seven out of every 10 consumers have video chatted with a business, up from six out of 10 in January.
- In August, a majority (54%) of respondents in EMEA reported using video chat, up from 42% in January.
- 16% of respondents preferred video chat in August to get step-by-step advice about a banking service, up from 9% in January.
- 25% of respondents preferred to speak with a therapist for a counselling session in August via video chat, up from 18% in January.
- Due to the advent of widespread distance learning, 42% of respondents report they prefer to engage with other students and teachers in a virtual classroom in August, up from 35% in January. This trend will likely continue as more students participate in virtual learning environments.
- SMS preference dropped 23% between January and August, as other preferred methods of communicating with businesses came out on top.
- With 30% of the vote, mobile phone calls are still consumers' favorite way to connect with businesses. But the remaining 70% of consumers prefer a variety of other options.
- Emerging communications channels such as social messaging apps showed a significant increase over January numbers, with 23% more consumers choosing these apps as a top-three method for calling businesses.
- Repeating themselves to different people (59%)
- Calls going unanswered with no other channels available to help (56%). This highlights the importance of secondary and tertiary choices for communication methods; offering another channel such as live chat can ensure that the customer’s needs are still met.
- When there aren't enough options to contact a business to suit a customer’s needs at the time (37% in APAC, 51% in LATAM, 36% in North America, 34% in U.K., and 35% in EMEA)
