In 2019, you couldn't really be blamed for sometimes thinking that the telephone is no longer a relevant means of communicating with your customers. After all, we are constantly pushed to engage in other means, chatbots, social media and messaging to name but a few.

The team at Answer4u are all for adapting their method and implementing new and improved means of communication, but with new research coming out all the time hailing the telephone as not only relevant, but pivotal, we feel justified in sticking to our guns when we say the telephone should be the crux of your business.

Research shows that the question shouldn't be 'how useful is having a customer line for my business?' but rather 'what really makes a difference to my customer when it comes to our call handling?'

Here's some more compelling research that's come out in the last few months.

Service With A Smile

The old adage of catching more flies with honey seems to be what customer service comes back to time and time again and never more so than when we're discussing the subject of telephone communication. Latest research by Clutch has not only revealed that actual human interaction is still highly important to most people (21% of people surveyed) but that the next most important thing is friendliness (19 % of people surveyed).

As we said the question of having a customer phone line shouldn't really be the question any more, but the quality of the person representing your company is the crux and one every business needs to focus on.

Knowing Why People Call Is Key

Clutch also discovered during their survey that one of the most common reasons for calling is for scheduling appointments (54%) whilst the least common reason is getting help in making a purchase (3%). Knowing what to expect from customer calls is the key way of knowing how to handle them. If the majority of the calls that you expect to take is placing orders or making a purchase, there's no point in spending too much time on calls that fall outside of those categories.

The Takeaway

Remember when the Kindle popped up and caused book lovers and stores everywhere to cringe? The obvious thought was that with the shiny bright Kindle, the need for actual books would be deemed obsolete and fall into obscurity. It was much the same with the dawn of the internet that ostensibly would see the death of the physical newspaper. However, as we have seen, the birth of new technology hasn't been quite the death sentence people expected and the same is true of telephone-based customer service. Whilst social media and chatbots have all helped make customer service more far reaching and on the customer's terms, the telephone is still regarded as one of the most efficient and pleasant ways to engage with each other and the reasons are simple: Human interaction is always wanted and never goes out of style.