Did Customer Expectations for Customer Service Change During COVID-19?

Serious, unusual circumstances like a pandemic tend to shine a spotlight on the call center insights that matter most.

That’s because stressful times and uncertain economic conditions can bring out the worst in everyone: customers’ emotions might run high while their patience hits an all-time low, and agents might forget or forego some of their training due to busier schedules or distractions created by new, work-from-home environments.

As a call center leader, you want to manage and optimize your call center team, so agents operate at a high-performing level despite any added, unanticipated intensity. You want to preserve and guarantee a superior customer experience at all times, no matter what.

The first and most important step to continuously delivering great customer service is to monitor and quickly act upon the most important call center insights. But which ones really are the most critical in today’s altered world?

COVID-19 gave us at Calabrio an unexpected opportunity to find out.

You’ve probably heard industry experts talk about how customers expected more from contact center representatives during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how many of those changes are here to stay. We’ve heard that, too.

But what exactly do they mean?

After all, customers always have had high expectations for the customer service representatives they entrust with their time. That’s why many companies safeguard their customer experience by purposefully designing tiered customer support teams, so even the most complex requests can be quickly resolved.

We needed to know more. So, to find out exactly how customer expectations for customer service teams shifted during COVID-19 and beyond, we surveyed 300 contact center employees in managerial roles across various industries in the U.S. and U.K.

  • 63% of U.S. managers believe customers will expect contact centers to offer multiple channels to communicate with representatives, and 53% of managers think those channels will include video conferencing.
    • Pre-pandemic, many companies already offered multiple communication channels — phone, email, chat, etc. — to customers needing assistance. That shift already was happening, and, in many cases, those new communication channels already were in place. But customers weren’t necessarily using them.
  • 62% of U.S. managers say customers will expect representatives to have more emotional empathy in their interactions — both during and after the pandemic — than ever before.
    • Regardless how far apart we might drift, undergoing a collective, widespread experience like a pandemic tends to bring humanity back together. It reignites and refuels the deep empathy innate to all of us. As a result, I believe it also increases the amount of empathy we expect from those we ask to assist us in some way, like customer service agents.
  • 57% of U.S. managers believe customers have a stronger need to “feel heard” by the representatives.
    • The never-before-seen, weird combination of factors we’ve had to deal with over the past 3-4 months — coping with a pandemic, working from home, home schooling our children, etc. — created an emotionally charged environment where exhausted consumers strapped for time can’t spare the extra energy required to repeatedly communicate their needs.
  • 54% of U.S. managers think customers will expect representatives to help them with more complex requests and questions.
    • Companies helped create this expectation by forcing customers through a single support channel — like phone or email — during the pandemic in an attempt to easily queue inquiries for on-again/off-again customer service agents working odd hours from different locations. But since few agents can assume the role of the 10-year veteran rep that can answer nearly any question thrown at him or her, many companies found it difficult to guarantee the more experienced and/or technical resources needed for more complex requests and questions would be available whenever needed.
  • 51% of U.S. managers believe the customer service experience will impact brand loyalty even more than before.
    • Brand loyalty can be a weird and finicky thing. But it typically comes down to one question: how good was your last customer service experience with that company?

From this survey, we’ve also collected the top three call center insights to track now.

Customer Sentiment And Satisfaction

Our survey confirmed that customer sentiment and satisfaction continues to be the top insight to track for continued call center success.

No surprise there, right? After all, negative customer sentiment and dissatisfaction with the customer service received are the primary factors that drive poor relationships with your brand and the biggest predictors of customer churn: if you aren’t showing positive sentiment or customers aren’t satisfied with the service or support they receive, they’ll look elsewhere.

A direct customer survey is the simplest, most common way companies track customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, only 1-2 percent of sent customer satisfaction surveys are actually completed, leaving managers uninformed about 98-99 percent of their team’s interactions.

Tools like speech analytics, sentiment analysis, and predictive net promoter scores are designed to fill that information void while uncovering even richer insights. And they do a great job — but only if you follow up their findings with focused, root-cause analysis.

For instance, look for commonalities within contacts that expressed high levels of customer satisfaction, then do the same for those with low levels of customer satisfaction. Which factors consistently drive customer sat to be high or low? One by one — prioritizing them if possible — fix each product, process or service issue that results in low satisfaction. Then do the same for the high customer satisfaction, so you can replicate and amplify what already works well.

Employee Experience And Productivity

While the first insight focuses on making sure you do everything possible to improve customer satisfaction, this second insight — employee experience and productivity — is about making sure you improve customer satisfaction in a cost-effective way. You want to proactively protect your company’s bottom line.

Experienced agents tend to receive higher or more positive scores and sentiment than their less-experienced peers. But cost efficiencies happen when experienced agents also deliver those positive interactions in a shorter period of time.

That’s why this important insight is a balancing act: weighing too heavily on higher customer satisfaction might decrease your team’s productivity due to longer interactions. Conversely, focusing on productivity at the sake of all else could cause a dramatic decrease in customer satisfaction due to hurried interactions.

To make the most of this insight, benchmark agents who can do both: they’re highly productive, but they also receive high customer sat/sentiment scores. Document exactly what they do — look at things like agent occupancy and the overall time they spend being productive, then correlate that data to their sentiment and customer sat scores.

Then develop a training, coaching and process plan to mimic their methods across all other agents.

Common Customer Problems Or Needs

According to our survey, the third top call center insight to track are the problems or needs common to your customers, which you can determine by categorizing contacts.

From a staffing perspective — which becomes even more critical during economic downturns — categorizing contacts to identify common customer problems or needs is one of the most important things you can do.

That’s because highly efficient call centers understand which specific bits of knowledge or skills are needed to quickly resolve common customer problems. They identify exactly what agents need to do and be in order to be most productive and efficient, then implement precise training and coaching programs that focus agents on topic areas that demonstrated the greatest need.

In my experience, speech analytics is the best tool to use to gain clarity on your customers’ common problems or needs because it helps you understand why people call and what they call about.

Then, similar to above, once you’ve identified the root causes of the problems or needs over which you have control, review and adjust your overall agent training and coaching to maximize its effectiveness.

Find out what else we learned from our survey — download the complete “The State of the Contact Center: Embracing The Evolving World of Work” quantitative report at www.calabrio.com.

*Based upon a recent survey of 300 contact center employees in managerial roles across various industries in the U.S. and U.K.

Did Customer Expectations for Customer Service Change During COVID-19?

Serious, unusual circumstances like a pandemic tend to shine a spotlight on the call center insights that matter most.

That’s because stressful times and uncertain economic conditions can bring out the worst in everyone: customers’ emotions might run high while their patience hits an all-time low, and agents might forget or forego some of their training due to busier schedules or distractions created by new, work-from-home environments.

As a call center leader, you want to manage and optimize your call center team, so agents operate at a high-performing level despite any added, unanticipated intensity. You want to preserve and guarantee a superior customer experience at all times, no matter what.

The first and most important step to continuously delivering great customer service is to monitor and quickly act upon the most important call center insights. But which ones really are the most critical in today’s altered world?

COVID-19 gave us at Calabrio an unexpected opportunity to find out.

You’ve probably heard industry experts talk about how customers expected more from contact center representatives during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how many of those changes are here to stay. We’ve heard that, too.

But what exactly do they mean?

After all, customers always have had high expectations for the customer service representatives they entrust with their time. That’s why many companies safeguard their customer experience by purposefully designing tiered customer support teams, so even the most complex requests can be quickly resolved.

We needed to know more. So, to find out exactly how customer expectations for customer service teams shifted during COVID-19 and beyond, we surveyed 300 contact center employees in managerial roles across various industries in the U.S. and U.K.

  • 63% of U.S. managers believe customers will expect contact centers to offer multiple channels to communicate with representatives, and 53% of managers think those channels will include video conferencing.
    • Pre-pandemic, many companies already offered multiple communication channels — phone, email, chat, etc. — to customers needing assistance. That shift already was happening, and, in many cases, those new communication channels already were in place. But customers weren’t necessarily using them.
  • 62% of U.S. managers say customers will expect representatives to have more emotional empathy in their interactions — both during and after the pandemic — than ever before.
    • Regardless how far apart we might drift, undergoing a collective, widespread experience like a pandemic tends to bring humanity back together. It reignites and refuels the deep empathy innate to all of us. As a result, I believe it also increases the amount of empathy we expect from those we ask to assist us in some way, like customer service agents.
  • 57% of U.S. managers believe customers have a stronger need to “feel heard” by the representatives.
    • The never-before-seen, weird combination of factors we’ve had to deal with over the past 3-4 months — coping with a pandemic, working from home, home schooling our children, etc. — created an emotionally charged environment where exhausted consumers strapped for time can’t spare the extra energy required to repeatedly communicate their needs.
  • 54% of U.S. managers think customers will expect representatives to help them with more complex requests and questions.
    • Companies helped create this expectation by forcing customers through a single support channel — like phone or email — during the pandemic in an attempt to easily queue inquiries for on-again/off-again customer service agents working odd hours from different locations. But since few agents can assume the role of the 10-year veteran rep that can answer nearly any question thrown at him or her, many companies found it difficult to guarantee the more experienced and/or technical resources needed for more complex requests and questions would be available whenever needed.
  • 51% of U.S. managers believe the customer service experience will impact brand loyalty even more than before.
    • Brand loyalty can be a weird and finicky thing. But it typically comes down to one question: how good was your last customer service experience with that company?

From this survey, we’ve also collected the top three call center insights to track now.

Customer Sentiment And Satisfaction

Our survey confirmed that customer sentiment and satisfaction continues to be the top insight to track for continued call center success.

No surprise there, right? After all, negative customer sentiment and dissatisfaction with the customer service received are the primary factors that drive poor relationships with your brand and the biggest predictors of customer churn: if you aren’t showing positive sentiment or customers aren’t satisfied with the service or support they receive, they’ll look elsewhere.

A direct customer survey is the simplest, most common way companies track customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, only 1-2 percent of sent customer satisfaction surveys are actually completed, leaving managers uninformed about 98-99 percent of their team’s interactions.

Tools like speech analytics, sentiment analysis, and predictive net promoter scores are designed to fill that information void while uncovering even richer insights. And they do a great job — but only if you follow up their findings with focused, root-cause analysis.

For instance, look for commonalities within contacts that expressed high levels of customer satisfaction, then do the same for those with low levels of customer satisfaction. Which factors consistently drive customer sat to be high or low? One by one — prioritizing them if possible — fix each product, process or service issue that results in low satisfaction. Then do the same for the high customer satisfaction, so you can replicate and amplify what already works well.

Employee Experience And Productivity

While the first insight focuses on making sure you do everything possible to improve customer satisfaction, this second insight — employee experience and productivity — is about making sure you improve customer satisfaction in a cost-effective way. You want to proactively protect your company’s bottom line.

Experienced agents tend to receive higher or more positive scores and sentiment than their less-experienced peers. But cost efficiencies happen when experienced agents also deliver those positive interactions in a shorter period of time.

That’s why this important insight is a balancing act: weighing too heavily on higher customer satisfaction might decrease your team’s productivity due to longer interactions. Conversely, focusing on productivity at the sake of all else could cause a dramatic decrease in customer satisfaction due to hurried interactions.

To make the most of this insight, benchmark agents who can do both: they’re highly productive, but they also receive high customer sat/sentiment scores. Document exactly what they do — look at things like agent occupancy and the overall time they spend being productive, then correlate that data to their sentiment and customer sat scores.

Then develop a training, coaching and process plan to mimic their methods across all other agents.

Common Customer Problems Or Needs

According to our survey, the third top call center insight to track are the problems or needs common to your customers, which you can determine by categorizing contacts.

From a staffing perspective — which becomes even more critical during economic downturns — categorizing contacts to identify common customer problems or needs is one of the most important things you can do.

That’s because highly efficient call centers understand which specific bits of knowledge or skills are needed to quickly resolve common customer problems. They identify exactly what agents need to do and be in order to be most productive and efficient, then implement precise training and coaching programs that focus agents on topic areas that demonstrated the greatest need.

In my experience, speech analytics is the best tool to use to gain clarity on your customers’ common problems or needs because it helps you understand why people call and what they call about.

Then, similar to above, once you’ve identified the root causes of the problems or needs over which you have control, review and adjust your overall agent training and coaching to maximize its effectiveness.

Find out what else we learned from our survey — download the complete “The State of the Contact Center: Embracing The Evolving World of Work” quantitative report at www.calabrio.com.

*Based upon a recent survey of 300 contact center employees in managerial roles across various industries in the U.S. and U.K.