Inflation and the Rising Expectations in Customer Experience

With both consumers and businesses facing record inflation, we wanted to know how rising costs are affecting customer experiences. To understand U.S. consumer sentiment, we surveyed 2,000 Americans about their expectations and priorities when it comes to customer service. Here’s what we found. 

High Expectations, Low Patience

When the price of things increases, expectations also increase: Over half (58%) of consumers said they expect better customer service since they’re paying more for everything. This was especially true for millennials — 61% said they have higher expectations, compared to 53% of Gen Z. 

Patience declines with age: 66% of boomers expect customer service issues to be resolved in 5 minutes or less compared to 59% of Gen X, 49% of millennials and just 39% of Gen Z. 

Speed Matters

Chatbots play an important role in keeping customers happy but Americans expect a lot when it comes to their interactions with bots.  Nearly all (95%) expect customer service issues to be resolved in under half an hour with a bot. Plus, nearly a third of consumers (31%) think bots are smarter than a fifth grader.  This trend highlights how far chatbots have evolved when it comes to assisting with automated customer experiences.

Consumers also said they’re likely to stick with a company with quick customer service. Over a third (39%) of Americans say they’re more likely to be loyal to companies with quick customer service if a recession hits. Quick service tied with in-stock items (39%) as the top metrics in our survey, which beat out “a generous return policy” (28%) and “whether a company does good in the world” (20%). 

Bots Are Getting Better

Of the people we surveyed, about 1 in 7  don’t even realize when they’re talking to a chatbot rather than a human agent. While 60% of Americans say it’s easy to tell when they’re talking to a bot, 14% say they can’t easily tell. Not surprisingly, consumers’ difficulty in identifying bot-or-not increases with age: a quarter (26%) of boomers said they find it difficult to tell when they’re talking to a chatbot. 

In addition to issue resolution, chatbots can replace manual processes such as categorizing, prioritizing and routing tickets to the right support destination. And AI-powered tools can help human agents resolve customer inquiries more quickly by providing dynamic auto-complete response suggestions to agents as they engage with customers. As bots continue to get more sophisticated,  we see their use increasing to help handle rising customer expectations. 

Machine-Aided Performance 

AI is also helping customer experience managers better understand how their teams are performing with customers. Freshworks’ CX Advisor Colin Crowley predicts we’ll see more of this in 2023 and that AI will play a major role in collecting customer feedback: 

“We expect to see attention shift beyond delivering a strong customer experience and instead focus more on how well each of those experiences is perceived by the consumer. Thanks to AI and text-based messages (via platforms like chat, SMS and WhatsApp) that mimic the cadence of human conversations, organizations can collect more sophisticated feedback. By deploying AI-powered surveys along with text and sentiment analysis, businesses will be able to understand their customers better than ever before and engage with them in a way that is more targeted and strategic.” 

“For Travix, chat is no longer ‘just another’ channel. That is a massive culture change for our company, which (previously) had leaned on manual processes and a ‘just give us a call’ approach to service for many years,” said Kimberly Strickland, Global CC Communications Manager at Travix. “And where agents benefit, customers get their queries resolved faster and better, ultimately leading to satisfied customers.”

We also asked consumers which industries they expected to have the slowest customer service to see how Freshworks customers stacked up with the rest of the country. Based on our analysis of aggregated and anonymized data from over 40,000 customers across 93 industry categories, we found that Freshworks customers outperformed the market for customer experience in key industries.

As inflation continues to impact consumer trends, companies will be wise to adjust to those trends using the latest tech. AI-enabled solutions and chatbots can help, as well as staying updated on the latest customer sentiment. For even more insights on consumer trends, check out our Freshdesk Customer Service Benchmark Report 2022