Getting familiar with waiting times of over an hour before you can talk to an agent? Has it gotten worse with the pandemic? What is going on with call centers? 

Imagine you booked tickets to an upcoming event that you are really excited about. A few weeks later, you get an email saying that your event has been canceled. You try to understand your options: can I get a refund, is the event postponed, what seating will I get if I reschedule, … You browse through the Web site and cannot find answers to your questions. So you decide to call the event’s customer service and then you have to wait for almost an hour until you can finally talk to an agent. 

This may sound like a familiar story. Through this blogpost, I will illustrate why with a few counterexamples.

 These bad experiences are mostly due to 4 main trends currently affecting contact centers.

⚠️High volumes on the phone channel

According to CFI group, 76% of people reaching out to customer service choose to place a phone call.

⚠️Unpredictable call volumes

 According to Talkdesk, 50% of retail CX professionals say the top challenge they face is high variability in the amount of customer support needed during holidays, seasonal spikes, off-season dips and others. People are also adapting to new situations such as work-from-home, virtual interactions and changing travel rules.

⚠️Rising call complexity

According to the Harvard Business Review which studied the effect of the COVID pandemic on customer service, the percentage of calls scored as “difficult” more than doubled, hold times increased by as much as 34 percent and escalations by 68 percent.

⚠️Increasing contact center workforce costs & complexity

According to CGS, 37% of companies are not confident or only somewhat confident in their ability to maintain service levels and prevent negative effects to service levels from additional waves of COVID. 

🌀A perfect storm for contact centers

The combination of these trends is putting a tremendous strain on contact centers. Managing a contact center workforce has become increasingly difficult with more unpredictable call volumes combined with hiring and staffing difficulties. 

Not being able to speak with a business can lead to lower customer satisfaction and engagement which can lead to loss of revenue and lower brand value. 

How can contact centers keep up? Hopefully, businesses can use different strategies to mitigate the impact of these challenges. To help choose the right strategies, it is important to consider the complexity as well as the volume of each use case or categories of calls. Call automation is becoming a key element for contact centers to let virtual agents handle simple, transactional calls and leave more complex, added-value calls to human agents. 

We will learn more about how contact centers can partner with providers to automate calls with reduced investments, more predictable costs and lower time to value in our soon-to-be-published article We are currently experiencing higher than normal call volumes.