54% People Want A Human To Speak With For Customer Support, But Don't Want To Hold For Too Long

These days, tech companies may be all about automation. But when it comes to customer service at least, it seems we still want to be able to speak to another person. Maybe it's just that you want to yell at a real person instead of a computer when things go wrong.

Either way, the numbers don't lie in a new survey conducted by Longitude on behalf of Verizon. The study involved 6,000 consumers across 15 countries including India.

People want real conversations

Their research showed that 54 of people trying to contact customer service prefer to do it over the phone. And we're not talking about just old-fashioned folk either.

Younger customers want it almost as much as older ones

Though millennials might be comfortable making app purchases and and digital wallet payments, when shit hits the fan they want to communicate directly with a person too. At least 38 percent of 18-24-year-olds said the same, as did 46 percent of 25-34-year-olds.

Millennials still want digital alternatives though

This is despite the fact that 55 percent of 18-24-year-olds are drawn to companies that offer newer digital customer experience alternatives, as well as 47 percent of 25-65 year olds. So companies look more attractive to a younger crowd when they have, for instance, the option to chat with customer support. However, many will still opt for the phone alternative.

Human conversation or bust

They're pretty unforgiving of being taken for granted too. If they hang up without talking to a company rep, 34 percent of these people never call back.

If you ditch customers, they'll ditch you

And if customer support doesn't have a person available on the other end, people aren't afraid to take their business elsewhere. The new report showed that 34 percent of people left unattended by a human employee would switch to a different brand. Additionally, if your customer service number is hard to find, 21 percent are likely to switch services right then.

Time's always running out for customer reps

Moreover, people don't have a lot of patience. A previous survey by Talkdesk uncovered that most people will stay on hold waiting for a customer service representative for at most 90 seconds on average.

Automated menus are not great at all

This also comes into play when, for example, a company has an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system for customer support. You know, it's the automated menu that tells you to press a number depending on the grievance on inquiry you have. Too many menu choices, or ones that are vague, could have customers hanging up even earlier.

Being too complicated is also bad

Take SBI's IVR system for its credit/debit card inquiries. That requires anywhere between two to four button presses just to get to your option of choice. And that's not including the time it takes to listen to all the choices in each menu step, not to mention how many times you have to enter your card or account numbers.