... THE TELEPHONY CHANNEL IS HOLDING FIRM, DESPITE THE RISE IN AI-ENABLED DIGITAL CHANNELS.
RESEARCH
FIGURE 1 HISTORICAL AVERAGE SPEED TO ANSWER & CALL ABANDONMENT RATE, 2012- 2024
... THE TELEPHONY CHANNEL IS HOLDING FIRM, DESPITE THE RISE IN AI-ENABLED DIGITAL CHANNELS.
The following section looks at how successful this has been, although suggests that the industry may be experiencing a pause in this process.
This trend – which negatively impacts customer experience( CX), as the length of the call queue has been shown to be one of the major factors driving customer satisfaction – has been driven in large part by the increase in call durations. The typical service call is now taking over seven minutes: 38 % longer than when we began tracking this metric in 2012.
Contact centers report that call duration is a far less important success metric than it has historically been, as organizations have allowed call times to increase as CX becomes more important and self-service now takes up a greater proportion of the easier short calls.
However, because agent headcount has not increased at the levels that support customer wait times of seconds rather than minutes, these longer call durations have impacted on queue times, which affect CX.
One of the main strategies for alleviating long queue times and high call abandonment rates is call deflection: moving some interactions away from the live voice channel and onto self-service or live digital channels.
FIGURE 2 INBOUND INTERACTIONS BY CHANNEL, 2007- 2024
THE MOVE TO DIGITAL AND AUTOMATION SEEMS TO HAVE STALLED
While there has certainly been a longterm movement towards digital channels – email has risen from 7 % of interactions in 2007 to almost 19 % today, and web chat from 1 % to 8 % in the same period – we can see that the telephony channel is holding firm, despite the rise in AI-enabled digital channels.
Live telephony accounts for 62 % of inbound interactions at the end of 2024, with a further 9 % coming through telephony self-service( of which the large proportion is touchtone IVR).( SEE FIGURE 2) APRIL 2025 15