As the world continues to grapple with the effects and – in some cases – the end result of the COVID-19 pandemic, one observation has become clear when it comes to businesses and consumerism. Customers have become far more demanding.
This is to be expected. We’re currently living in high times of increased anxiety, with redundancies, bereavement and financial issues taking place in many households.
One interesting piece of research by Five9 to come out of this however, is that the contact centre has become the only communication method that’s able to keep up with the demands of customers. Perhaps even more shocking is that now, 51% of Americans have only interacted with businesses through their contact centres during the pandemic.
With that in mind, Scott Kolman, SVP of Marketing at Five9, told us in an exclusive interview that this staggering figure illustrates the critical nature of a smooth-running system.
He added: “There are two ways the use of AI in the contact centre contributes to the demonstration of empathy to the customer. First, it enables the contact centre agent to focus on the customer rather than systems. In this way, the agent is fully in the moment listening to the customer including changes in tone and behaviour while AI can collect the key elements of the call for automated call summarisation.
“Second, as AI is automatically transcribing (speech to text) and analysing the call itself, it can prompt the agent with recommendations and guidance on how to address the customer’s issues. This not only makes the call itself more efficient for the company and the customer, it demonstrates to the customer that the company or organisation cares about them and understands their needs.”
Five9 also revealed in their research that 32% of consumers say they reach out to contact centre more now than before. We asked him if he believed this was solely down to businesses only operating online, or that customers are actively seeking out interactions they cannot currently have due to COVID lockdowns.
He told us: “Great question. There are a number of factors that come into play here. First of all, for existing relationships a customer might have had pre-pandemic, in many instances, the only option currently available is to engage via a contact centre. An example of that is a retail bank where due to health and safety reasons, they are restricting the number of in-person interactions. As a result, many consumers turn to the bank’s contact centre to address issues they would otherwise have handled in the bank branch itself.
“The secondary benefit to this is an increased level of confidence consumers gain in having their issues resolved to their satisfaction. While in the past they may not have considered calling the contact centre for some of these issues, they now know it can be done quickly and efficiently.
“Related to this is behavioural changes themselves. As the pandemic stretched to the second year, consumers are getting used to the way they now communicate with various organizations and many are unlikely to go back to the old ways once available.”
No Place for Loyalty
Finally, up to 38% of respondents left brands they were previously loyal to during the pandemic, the study revealed. According to Kolman there’s more than one reason for this.
He said: “I believe there are a few reasons to this. The first factor the issue of necessity. As much the world moved to an at-home environment virtually overnight, many of the businesses we used to frequent were either unavailable, or exceedingly difficult to obtain. Think retail shopping or restaurants. Here is where online merchandising stepped in. I for one, no longer frequent quite a few retailers that I had used for many years. Now I go online first to find what I need, and I must admit, I don’t typically care who is offering those services.
“Another is that with the pandemic customer service expectations and the importance of customer experience has been elevated. It is now easy for me as a consumer to see which organisations have stepped up to deliver that experience virtually, and which have not. Do they acknowledge me as a customer and my relationship with the brand? Do they go out of their way to keep me informed of the status of an order? With a more level playing field than ever before, customers have a wealth of options and if the brand does not deliver on expectations, they move on.”
To summarise, even with the swift mass business closures leading to more calls than usual, most organisations were able to continue servicing customers with little impact on the customer experience. That said, the results reveal that some substantial consumer behavioral changes are here to say.
