First Black Friday, then Christmas, next up January sales. With so much shopping done online it makes sense for customer service support to have shifted there too. But when there’s a problem with your purchase is customer service good enough?

So much is available instantly now, movies and TV shows stream in seconds, but a slower internet connection can generate frustrated tuts and those extra seconds can feel like an eternity. The age of instant gratification comes at a price, it’s making us less patient. I feel like I get faster responses and the issue resolved, when opt to contact a brand or business via twitter, but is that perception over reality?

It isn’t just customer services I prefer not to call, I don’t really call my friends and family anymore, I text and use messenger apps. Phoning customer services has a bad rep and is always something I have to put time aside to do, with the expectation that I will have to spend much more time waiting in a hold queue listening to cheesy music, being told I can resolve the matter myself online – believe me telephone hold service if I could I would have!

So when it comes to resolving an issue I often I am an O2 customer and a happy O2 customer, I recently wanted to change tariffs and wanted to get some advice. Normally I pop into the local store, I know so 1995, but their Black Friday deals had physical queues out the door and down the high street. At home I tweeted them and waited but time is my most precious commodity and I’m not good at waiting! I made a cuppa, braced myself for a wait but at least I was in the warm and picked up the phone.

The automated menu enquiry filter system was straight forward and easy and I was connected to a human, an English speaking, UK based human too within a few minutes! Great advice, all done and dusted, and my cuppa was still hot. Can’t lie I was surprised! I continue to be a happy O2 customer but had I lost hours of my time to get the answer I can see how this would be a brand shifting milestone. It certainly was when it came to our TV and broadband provider!

CALLCARE have undertaken a recent campaign on this and found that it was actually much quicker to contact mobile phone companies by phone than on social media. Whereas it takes people nearly an hour and a half on average to get an answer via Twitter, we were able to get through to customer service representatives by phone in under four minutes on average.

Check out CALLCARE’s infographic to get the full lowdown on customer service response times.