Consumer Communication Preferences

Your customers’ want what they want, when and how they choose. That’s not a revolutionary concept, but needs repeating from time to time. It is easy, apparently, for you to project your desires on your prospect or customer. It doesn’t work now…maybe (with a few exceptions) it never worked. I’ve made these statements about sales, about how prospects buy, about your customer journey map (I won’t rant about them this time, but you can read about that here and here), service and support and probably a few other topics. Let’s look at one of the most fundamental issues though, consumers care about how you interact with them, and on what channel for each specific online activity.

One of my clients, Sendbird, came to me with an interesting prompt a few months ago, “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 decided to ask consumers around the globe. We ran a survey of 1200 individuals in all three major geographic regions. What we learned may surprise you:

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

• The penalty for poor communication practices can be stiff, with nearly 1 in 4 respondents having switched brands or not renewed a subscription because the company sent too many emails or text / SMS messages.

• Over communicating leads 1 out of 2 consumers to miss or ignore communications by phone, email, text / SMS and social media.

• Trust is an important factor for consumers in choosing a communication channel.

• Overuse of text / SMS is creating fatigue in consumers who reported receiving more text / SMS unwanted and/or spam over the past 12 months (34%) and 72% reported that text / SMS is the least trusted communication channel from businesses.

Text / SMS continues to be the fastest growing channel from a business use perspective, however, much like email and phone before it, it is increasingly seen as overused and bothersome. The spam email problem is mitigated by “spam filters” and phone spam by that nifty feature that lets you ignore any call not in your contacts…it is only a matter of time till a feature is available to get rid of spam SMS (beyond blocking, which people already use regularly). Meet the customer where they are, not where you want them to be.

If you’d like to download the report, you can do that here.

You can also read more from Sendbird here.