22% of Americans would rather spend a night in jail than contact customer service.

People really, really hate contacting customer support – so much so that they would rather spend a night in jail or shave their head. (Source: Gray News)

A recent  survey conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Twilio Flex asked 2,000 Americans what they would rather do than contact customer service. The poll found that 30% of people would rather do their taxes, 28% would rather go to the dentist, 25% would rather go to the DMV, 24% would rather shave their head, and 22% would rather spend a night in jail.

People are willing to go to those extremes to avoid contacting customer support because, on average, it takes three attempts and more than 1.5 hours on hold to solve just one issue with a customer service representative, the survey found.

Here are some things that a company can do to help their customers:

1. Make sure the issue is resolved on the first call – customers hate having to call a company multiple times to resolve an issue.
2. Don’t transfer the call so that they must repeat all the details again. Give the next person relevant information to their issue if you can’t resolve it.
3. Have more than one option to reach customer service: we have a help line, local and 1-800, and a he**@*********ad.com email our clients can use.
4. Make sure they can reach a live person quickly and not spend too much time listening to bad music.
5. Have a good connection – nothing is more frustrating that getting disconnected or a hard time hearing the representative.
6. Make sure you give your employees the power to resolve an issue so that the customer does not have to wait for an answer.

The survey found that because of these frustrations, the average person waits 16 days to contact customer support about an issue. There are always issues in any business, ultimately, your success depends on how you resolve them.