It’s fair to say that the past year has been a strange one. We’ve been socializing over video instead of going to the pub, our living room has become our office, and we’ve been doing more and more shopping online because physical stores are closed. But has the pandemic fundamentally changed our behaviors forever?
As my crystal ball is still cracked, surveys remain the most reliable way to find out what’s on customers’ minds. For the past 10 years, BT has been doing a biennial global temperature check of customer experience priorities. The last survey was published in February 2020, the last month of normality for many of us, so we decided to douma edição extraordinária em fevereiro de 2021to see what difference an (extraordinary) year has made.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
If there were one phrase to sum up the research, it would be “plus plus c’est la même chose.” Many customer attitudes toward customer experience haven’t changed belgium mobile phone number at all during the 12 months of the pandemic. Service expectations are still extremely high (for example, 77% say they buy more from companies that provide excellent customer service, up 1% from 2020).
The main changes in behavior are in four areas:
More people are finding dealing with service issues more exhausting (73%, up 9% from a year ago). This isn’t surprising given that most of us are dealing with a pandemic and are juggling extreme tasks. Organizations that add to our stress are not something we need right now.
While many of us have shifted to digital channels, 82% of customers report that they are struggling to do some of the basic things online, such as changing their order, choosing delivery times or even making payments!
Convenience is now ranked more important than price (58% of customers, up 7% from 12 months ago) as people confined to their homes turn to home delivery and hyperlocal services.
The biggest shift was toward video chat, with 85% saying they’d like to interact with organizations via video. This has been fueled by the video culture that’s been prevalent during the pandemic and will likely continue to grow in niche areas like remote healthcare, financial advice, product demos, inspection/installation/diagnosis, and (thanks to our connected doorbells) where to drop off packages when we eventually leave the house. It’s debatable whether video will become a dominant contact channel in the long term (especially since contact center agents report that customers are often doing something else when they contact them, including eating, cooking, driving, and watching TV).
Hybrid Super Agent Support
Contact centers have become a lifeline during the pandemic, and customers generally report that they have risen to the occasion. But we were curious to learn how agents have adapted to serving customers during these extraordinary times.
The perfect storm of cloud, connectivity and collaboration tools has made this pandemic much less painful now than it would have been 10 years ago, with many organisations able to deploy home-based agents almost overnight. Remote working in contact centres is not new, but it had not yet been embraced wholeheartedly by the industry. BT’s first trials were in 1992, when we had to bulldoze front gardens to bring connectivity into homes (because WiFi and 4G/5G didn’t exist) and video conferencing units were the size of a small fridge – extremely expensive to install! While times are definitely changing from a technology and cost perspective, it took a pandemic to change thinking.