Everyone involved in customer service wants to understand consumer channel preference. Otherwise, how can you allocate resources between phone, email, chat, SMS messaging and social channels?
So, we’re all involved in a little anthropology project. In my best David Attenborough voice: “Let’s observe this 35 year-old male as he wishes to find out why his order is late.”
In fact, it may be harder than anthropology because we are looking forward as well as at the present and the past. We also want to know what the preferences will be next year, and in five years. Otherwise, how can we plan ahead? Technology takes time to deploy.
It’s understandable that there is a craving for data on this topic. Every year, many analyst firms and research groups try to illuminate the future with surveys. And one of the most common ways to present results from those surveys is via the cohort chart. It seems to give us the exact answers we need, but can also be misleading.
![[Whitepaper] The New Customer Service Lexicon](https://fonolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Whitepaper-The-New-Customer-Service-Lexicon.png "[Whitepaper] The New Customer Service Lexicon")
The world of customer service is ever expanding, making it a complicated and dynamic space to navigate. With new communication channels appearing and evolving every year, it’s a challenge to understand how they relate to each other, and how they should work together. New terminology can help our thought process, if we all agree on the meaning. Conversely, ambiguity about words like “digital” or “chat” or “call” makes the navigation harder.
Customers increasingly prefer chat over other communication channels, but chat suffers from an 
Customer service is arguably the single most important aspect of any organization. With that, support departments have to understand how customers wish to communicate in order to be successful.
Messaging is growing at a 
The eternal conflict in customer service is between delivering a good experience and keeping costs low. For example, pushing callers to self-serve IVR lowers cost, but customers hate dealing with phone menus and “talking to the machine”. The industry has always sought a way for customers and companies to interact that is enjoyable for the former and cost effective for the latter. Hopes are high that “messaging” is that messiah.
In light of today’s webinar on the 
