SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Hiya, the leading call performance management cloud, has released its 5th annual State of the Call report based on more than 150 billion calls analyzed, and 12,000 consumers and 2,000 businesses surveyed in the U.S., Canada, UK, Germany, Spain, and France. The report finds that consumers and businesses prefer the phone call over all other methods of communication, and that spam and fraud calls are a growing problem globally.
Consumers and businesses prefer the phone call
Across the globe, consumers prefer to pick up the phone when they need to connect with their bank, credit card company, insurance agent, healthcare provider, pharmacy, delivery service, and especially coworkers, friends, and family.
Top communication channels, ranked by consumers:
- Phone Call: 32%
- Email: 20%
- Text Messaging/IM: 12%
- Video Call: 6%
- Website Chatbots: 5%
- Other/NA: 26%
To connect with customers, businesses have turned to voice––particularly for time-sensitive interactions such as responding to customer inquiries, scheduling appointments, and closing sales––and predict their use of voice will increase (36% of businesses) or stay the same (50%) in the next 12 months.
Unidentified calls hurt legitimate businesses
Consumers are screening the majority of unidentified calls. Just two out of 10 unidentified calls are answered, compared to seven out of 10 identified calls that are answered. Consumers have grown suspicious of unidentified…
