For years, contact centres have invested heavily in refining IVR menus, tightening call flows, and reducing handle times. The entire service model has been built around the assumption that customer journeys begin with a phone call. But customer behaviour has quietly rewritten that reality. Today, people aren’t patiently navigating your IVR, they’re already in your WhatsApp inbox, your Instagram DMs, your Facebook messages, and even your TikTok comments before they ever think about dialing your number.
The phone is no longer the “front door” of customer service. It’s simply one of many doors, and often not the first one customers reach for.
Why Customers Default to DMs
A DM feels immediate, convenient, and familiar. People already spend most of their day chatting on social apps, so using the same space to contact a business just feels normal. Messaging also makes life easier in that customers can multitask, drop a screenshot or a voice note, and skip the whole ‘please hold’ experience. What used to feel like a formal process, like calling a support line, has now turned into a simple back-and-forth conversation. And honestly, that’s how most customers prefer it.
Where Brands Fall Behind
Even though customer behaviour has shifted, many organisations haven’t shifted with it. Messages across different channels often land in scattered inboxes, with no routing, no visibility, and no accountability. DMs get treated as “social media issues” instead of serious customer interactions, and as a result, they go unanswered or are answered too late.
The customer journey doesn’t collapse because of a poorly designed IVR, it collapses because a message sat unseen in a digital inbox that no one owns. These days, with everything happening in real time and customers sharing feedback publicly, letting a message slip through the cracks can do far more damage than a missed call ever could.
Why Unified Conversations Matter
Digital channels reveal the raw truth of customer experience. People communicate more openly, more emotionally, and with more detail in messaging apps than they ever could through structured IVR flows. But without the right systems, this richness becomes chaos. Teams jump across platforms, context gets lost, and businesses lose control over the customer experience.
A unified communication platform changes this completely. When all your customer conversations land in one place, your team can respond quicker and catch issues before they snowball. A WhatsApp message gets the same attention as a phone call. A TikTok DM is handled with the same care as an email. Nothing goes missing and nothing gets overlooked.
This is the direction customer support is moving toward: a single, connected space instead of a maze of tabs, inboxes and apps.
The Future Belongs to Conversational CX
Customer service is shifting toward real, ongoing conversations. People who find and engage with your brand on social media naturally expect the transition to customer support to be seamless. Although voice still plays its part, it’s no longer the centre of the whole experience. For customers, convenience, speed, and the freedom to pick their preferred channel is now the standard.
Brands that recognise this shift earn trust, avoid avoidable blow-ups, and stay visible in the places where their customers already spend their time.
