When it comes to interacting with your customers’ for sales, marketing and customer service consumers are clear, they want what they want, when and how they choose. That’s not a new concept, but is a map to improved customer experiences. Offering the channel that a prospect or customers trusts and prefers is much more likely to lead to a positive outcome for the interaction.

Earlier this year Sendbird approached us about sponsoring a global study on consumer communication preferences. The survey, conducted in February was built around the prompt: “what communication channels do consumers trust, which do they distrust, which do they prefer for a variety of online activities and what happens when you do, and don’t meet them where they are?” To answer those questions we ask 1200 consumers in all three major geographic regions. The second report from the study is available to download. What we learned might surprise you:

• When you offer the consumers' preferred communication channel, they are more likely to remain a customer (82%), buy more (69%) and become an advocate (66%).

• Consumer channel preferences vary by activity. This seems to be related to a combination of trust (or lack of trust) and the perception of managing risk by choosing a channel that matches the risk profile of the activity.

• There's growing fatigue with text / SMS due to the rapid expansion of its use as a communication channel across business functions. The exception though is with personalized offers based on location or time of day, where SMS is the #2 most preferred channel (36%), just behind the #1 choice, email (55%).

• Nearly 1 in 3 consumers give businesses false contact information to prevent them from spamming or over communicating with them.

• Nearly half of consumers trust chatbots for shopping and entertainment, but that falls to 1 in 4 for banking and healthcare.

• Most consumers prefer interacting with a live human for support, but will tolerate a chatbot for immediate response. The chatbot must be helpful by either solving the issue or transferring to a live agent who can; however, 1 in 4 consumers chose to switch brands or not renew a subscription because they had a bad customer service experience with a chatbot / automated online system.

Download Report One here

Download Report Two here

Read more from Sendbird here