The younger generation still prefer to contact companies by phone

The UK’s top 100 brands are letting down thousands of customers every day by keeping themselves at arm’s length and out of easy reach.

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, consumers ranked the telephone, email and web forms as the most preferred three methods. Yet just a disappointing 41 of the top 100 brands offer all three of these channels.

Only one company, b2b 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 fewer.

The study also went on to reveal some surprising differences between age groups. The younger generations, both the 18-24-year-olds and 25-34-year-olds prefer to contact brands by telephone, whereas the 35-44-year-olds and 55+-year-olds chose email as their preferred option.

Twitter is wholly rejected by all age ranges as a medium to contact brands and yet despite this damning statistic, 90 per cent of the top 100 brands have invested in a Twitter presence.

Comments Penny Hutton, strategy and planning director, Eclipse Marketing: “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.”

Top 100 Brands (Interbrand Top 100 2010)

20 Jul 2011 - Filed under Call Centre News

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