Today, Bitkom released a representative survey on customer advice for online purchases. The results reveal that a fifth of respondents had already used personal advice when shopping on the internet.
For this study, Bitkom Research on behalf of the digital association Bitkom conducted an online survey in November 2019 with a total of 1,087 Internet users aged 16 and above, including 1,024 online shoppers.
These are further details:
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20 percent of all respondents have already used advice when shopping. Telephone advice or call-back campaigns (61 percent) are used most frequently, followed by advice by email (60 percent), by chat with a service employee (59 percent), by chatbot (22 percent), via social media or messenger services (17 percent) or via video chat (seven percent).
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14 percent of respondents, who had received advice via text chat, could not say whether they dealt with a real person or a programmed bot in retrospect.
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Among online shoppers, men (23 percent) were more likely to use online advice than women (17 percent).
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Younger consumers were more likely to use advice by either telephone, chat or social media; 22 percent of 16 to 29 year olds and 23 percent of 30 to 49 year olds used this option, compared to 17 percent of 50 to 64 year olds and 14 percent of the 65-plus generation.
Florian Lange, retail expert at Bitkom, commented: "Especially during the Corona crisis, many people shop online. In doing so, they do not have to do without the kind of advice as in stationary retail. Today, companies usually offer many different channels through which customers can contact their staff members. Chatbots have been particularly important for some years now: They answer frequently asked questions, are available around the clock and reduce the workload of human employees."
Source: Bitkom
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