Customers Value Human Interaction

Accenture Strategy (New York) released a report from Global Consumer Pulse Research that found that many retailers are sacrificing consumers’ need for interactive customer service to instead focus on e-commerce.

In “Digital Disconnect in Customer Engagement,” the company found that 83 percent of U.S. consumers prefer to deal with humans when an issue arises and almost half are willing to pay a higher price for that kind of personalized experience. It also found that 65 percent of shoppers feel in-store shopping provides the most personalized experiences.

Robert Wollan, Accenture Strategy’s senior managing director of advanced customer strategy, told Women’s Wear Daily that retailers “wrongly assume that their digital-only customers are their most profitable and that customer service is a cost. They overinvest in digital technologies and channels and lose their most profitable customers ­— multichannel shoppers — who want experience in both digital and traditional channels.”