The UK’s top 100 brands are potentially letting down thousands of customers every day by failing to make it easy to contact them, according to a study, which also exposes the folly of expecting people to use Twitter.
Research commissioned by Eclipse Marketing found that less than half of these brands enable customers to contact them in the way they actually desire.
When it comes to contacting brands, consumer’s ranked the telephone, email and Web forms as the most preferred three methods. Yet just 41 of the top 100 brands offer all three of these channels.
Only one company, business to business organisation Oracle, offers their customers all of the seven main channels (phone, email, Web form, live chat, call back, Facebook and Twitter), with the majority of the top 100 brands (36%) having a mix of four of the seven. Only three retailers were found to have six channels available for consumers to reach them through and the food and drink sector was by far the worst performer with brands such as Pepsi, Corona, Campbells, Jack Daniels and KFC having three forms of contact or less.
The study also went on to reveal some surprising differences between age groups. The younger generations, both the 18 to 24 year-olds and 25 to 34 year-olds prefer to contact brands by telephone, whereas the 35 to 44 year-olds and 55+ year-olds chose email as their preferred option. However, 45 to 54 year-olds also prefer the phone.
Twitter is wholly rejected by all age ranges as a medium to contact brands and yet 90% of the top 100 brands have invested in a Twitter presence.
Eclipse Marketing strategy and planning director Penny Hutton said: “Some brands are forgetting that dialogue is a two-way street. Many are preoccupied with marketing and how they reach their customers, but are forgetting about the other way round – how their customers can reach them. Brands seem to be spending large amounts on their social media presence across Facebook and Twitter, but it seems these are not the channels that consumers really want.”
