Like many other industries, the call centre industry too, has borne the brunt of the global pandemic. In fact, the coronavirus pandemic has pushed IT leaders to move at an incredibly fast pace and accomplish objectives they never conceived likely, let alone possible. Perhaps nowhere has this been more acute than in the call centre.
The pandemic has exposed a need for contact centre solutions beyond what we’ve seen in the past. One of them is virtualized call centres, a growing trend facilitated by the cloud, but when the pandemic hit, most customer support organizations did not have plans for enabling staff to work from home.
Weak Points of Call Centres Exposed
Call centres have always been the punching bag of customer complaints across the globe. But the environment before the pandemic was a familiar one – organizations had a fair idea on the average number of calls that would come in, the kind of complaints they’d face daily, and the solutions they had to offer. But then came the pandemic, and the number of incoming calls—as well as the anxiety, impatience, and stress levels of callers—spiked considerably, thereby pushing the call centres off balance. The pressure and the chaos grew, and not many organizations had the right customer support solutions in place.
New Trends in the Call Centre Industry
The pandemic has seen some new trends, both positive and negative, that could leave a lasting impact.
- Job transformation: Unemployment rates have grown significantly because companies have been hard pressed to cut costs. And by the looks of it, most of these jobs will never be fulfilled by humans again.
- Fast-paced digitization: Remote access services and other hands-free and contact-free services were on the rise. And with the pressures of COVID-19, this trend has accelerated.
- Cybercrime is on the rise: Many organizations did not have the right remote infrastructure making them vulnerable to professional hackers.
Evolution of Call Centres
Customer service goes beyond call centres. We know of technology such as well-designed interactive voice response (IVR), voice bots, voice verification, artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots, natural language processing (NLP), and others that were growing in popularity. But now, its usage has accelerated to help reduce the burden on call centres and the wait times for users.
Many organizations have also taken on outsourcing technical customer support services to call centres as they’re unable to handle the industry’s growing needs fueled by the pandemic. Learn more about how Pathway Communications can help you deliver the best customer experience.
