Chat-based customer service is growing quickly. But there’s one central question that I think is not being addressed as critically as it should: Is chat acting as a substitute for phone calls? This is a harder question to answer than you might think.
First, to be clear, I’m not talking about chat-bots, i.e. automated self-service, I’m talking about a conversation with a human agent via some form of text-based channel. (Chatbots are an important topic too, which we’ve covered separately here and here, and will revisit shortly.)
If it is proven that a significant amount of conversations that would have been voice are moving to chat, that has huge implications for the 40,000 US call centers, and the $25 billion BPO industry. But note the italicized part of the sentence; That crucial point is often glossed over by analysis of this topic. Why is it hard to get a definitive answer?
We live in a world filled with numbers. From our personal lives to our professional habitats, metrics always tend to find their way in. Our understanding of which metrics are the most relevant, and the most up-to-date, is where we typically stumble. It’s no different in the contact center space, in fact, it’s amplified. This world lives by benchmarks and call center professionals are always seeking to find the latest numbers to follow.
Contact center operations and the technology that’s used to aid the experience has progressed tremendously over the years (See 
Before you answer that – consider how much time consumers actually spend on hold. According to 
