Hey Team,

Another week, another newsletter.

This week, I’ll be sharing some helpful stats on the forgotten child within every company - the Contact Centre, or Contact Center for the 🇺🇸 people!

Why should YOU care about the contact centre? 🤔

Well, it’s a huge cost driver for every organisation.

• If you deliver poor customer service, costs to serve customers will increase and their is a high chance of lost revenue via churn. In fact, it is estimated that companies in the 🇺🇸 lose nearly $75bn in revenue every year due to poor customer service.

  
  

• Additionally, if you deliver a poor digital experience, it’s highly likely that you will receive unnecessary calls coming into the contact centre. Some research that I did found that it is 83x more expensive to manage a customer in the contact centre ($8 per resolution), compared to resolving them online ($0.10 per interaction) 👇 👇

If someone were to ask me what the largest opportunity to drive operational efficiencies in most organisations is today, I would say digital containment. Feel free to check out this newsletter if you want to go deeper into this topic.

12 Contact Centre Stats You Need To See In 2023 👀

#1 - Make Customer Service Your Differentiator

When a company makes customers feel appreciated, 76% indicate they’ll keep their business with the brand, 80% say they will spend more with the brand, and 87% will recommend the brand to friends and family members. (Source: Forrester, 2021)

#2 - Human > Robots

75% of consumers still prefer human interaction even as automated solutions improve. (Source: Customerthink)

In saying this, customers expectations are also rising - they expect frontline agents to know what they want. According to Freshworks, 38% of consumers expect agents to have the context of their queries.

#3 - Fix Your IVRs

56% of consumers cite automated telephone systems as the most frustrating aspect of poor customer service. (Source: Customerthink)

61% of callers feel that an interactive voice response (IVR) system has a bad effect on the customer experience. (Source: Small Business Trends, 2019)

💡 Replace hold music with a customer-choice song requestor. Let the customer listen to what they want when they’re on hold.

#4 - Train Agents For Complexity

The number of calls recorded as “difficult” spiked by more than 100% from the day a pandemic was declared by the WHO back in March of 2020. (Source: HBR)

💡 As digital transformation allows more customers to self-service online, expect calls in the contact centre to become more complex. These calls will likely take longer but are extremely important to resolve (as there’s no alternate solution). Due to the changing nature of calls, it’s critical that the way you measure success in the contact centre also changes. First Call Resolution & CSAT / NPS should be considered more important to agents than a vanity metric like AHT.

#5 - The Best Companies Are Offering Predictive / Proactive Customer Service

70% of customers have a more favorable view of brands that offer or contact them with proactive customer service notifications. (Source: Statista)

💡 Use operational data to detect issues before customers call in about them e.g. how can you alert customers of a website issue before it impacts them?

#6 - Your Social Media Presence Is Critical In 2023

The number of messages sent by customers to businesses via Facebook increased by more than 100% between 2019 and 2020. (Source: Facebook)

AND …

59% of customers have a more favorable view of brands that respond to customer service questions or complaints on social media. (Source: Statista)

💡 The best social responses that I’ve seen use a mix of empathy & humour to diffuse the situation ..

#7 - Don’t Forget About Your “Outdated” Channels

76% of customers are calling on the phone when contact customer service. (Source: CFI Group)

Despite bots and automation, conventional technologies like the telephone and email will account for 81.5% of the total contact centre inbound interactions. (Source: Call Centre Helper, 2020)

💡 Whilst phone calls are inevitable (and always will be), it’s important to figure out WHY so many people are calling up i.e. the leak points. Try to measure & understand what other channels they’ve tried to interact with before resorting to a phone call.

#8 - Fix Your “Leaky” Digital Channels ($$)

92% of customers try to resolve an issue before contacting customer service. (Source: CFI Group)

💡 According to Gartner, digital interactions cost $0.10 to resolve. Conversely, contact centre interactions cost ~$8 to resolve.

How much money could you save if you helped 10% more customers resolve their issues digitally?

#9 - Let Your Customer Service Teams WFH!

Retention rate for at-home agents is 80% versus 25% for in-house. (Source: Pipkins).

💡 It costs ~$10-$20k to replace a frontline agent (recruiting, training, lost productivity). This decision should be a no-brainer. I also suspect that it would benefit WFM forecasting, as agents will not have to travel as far for work.

#10 - Figure Out Where Your Customers Interact

Since Covid-19, two-thirds of customers are using video chat more than they did. (Source: Vonage, 2020).

9 out of 10 consumers want an omnichannel experience with seamless service between communication channels. (Source: CX Today, 2019).

75% of consumers look forward to a consistent experience across multiple engagement channels–social media, mobile, online, in-person, or through the phone. 73% will likely change brands if they don’t get it. (Source: Salesforce)

#11 - First Call Resolution (FCR) = Improved Retention

When a customer’s problem is resolved on the first call, only 1% is likely to go to a competitor as compared to 15% when the issue is not addressed sufficiently. (Source: VOIP-Info.org, 2020)

#12 - CSAT > AHT As A KPI

95.7% of contact centre professionals view customer satisfaction as the most important call centre metric. (Source: Call Centre Helper, 2021).

VISUAL OF THE WEEK 📈

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