The most revealing customer experience stats from 2021

To understand the present, you have to know the past. Numerous predictions have already been made for 2022, but it’s worth taking a step back to understand the consequential changes that occurred in the last twelve months. In a year when face-to-face interactions meant the most, contact centre agents rose to the occasion. Here are the three key customer experience stats from 2021 that highlight those shifts in contact centre culture.

2021 customer experience stat #1: The value of the global public cloud infrastructure market is even bigger than imagined

Let’s boldly start off with one we were wrong on. Last year, we discussed and backed Forrester’s valuation of the global public cloud infrastructure growth prediction of 35% taking it to billion. Perhaps we were too quick to champion that number — because the value was undersold. Multiple recent reports state that this figure stands at $445.3 billion, with the potential to grow to $947.3 billion by 2026. That’s a compound annual growth rate of 16.3%. Let that sink in for a moment: the global cloud market could be worth nearly $1 trillion within five years. 

That staggering number indicates that all the world over, confidence in the stability and security of the cloud is mushrooming. This is a good thing, as cloud technologies are making possible the new reality of work brought about by recent global health events. The most obvious pain point in making the switch to the cloud is the initial inconvenience. With that said, when Belgian telecom firm VOO needed to quickly find a cloud solution at the beginning of the pandemic, they were able to make the transition in a few weeks. The versatility, security, and ROI that cloud storage provides have validated Odigo’s work with cloud technologies from day one.

2021 customer experience stat #2: self-service is being normalised

Recent global health events did more than just change the reality of the working world, they changed the way that customers sought out support. The Call Centre Management Association’s report on Voice of the Contact Centre Consumer highlighted increases in the willingness to self-serve in a variety of areas in only 6 short months. In fact, in the grocery and retail sector, the willingness to self-serve is almost 70% and 29% of people anticipate using chatbots more in the future.  These chatbots are becoming more adept at handling more complex customer queries as well, which increases the chances of raising customer service metrics like customer effort score (CES) and net promoter score (NPS). It’s the reason that 9 out of 10 European executives are looking to leverage AI-led customer experience (CX) technologies for their brands.

In spite of all of these exciting future-proof technologies, let’s not lose sight of contact centre agents. AI-led solutions should not replace agents, but rather supplement them. They can benefit from AI in two ways. One, though chatbots may become capable of handling more complex language, they lack the human touch. A key skill of contact centre agents is the ability to imbue empathy and emotion into interactions. Customers obviously value these interactions because they feel understood, but they are crucial for agents as well. Using their interpersonal skills to engage customers by speaking freely can be a key to combating attrition and burnout. 

Two, AI helps agents in the course of customer interactions in the form of learning to use real-time agent assist tools, which cannot be underestimated as a skill in itself. These not only help with note-taking and data entry, but they actively use information from in-progress conversations to activate knowledge retrieval and behaviour guidance. Both of these things mean an improved agent experience (AX), which translates to improved CX. Since the start, Odigo has kept both customer and agent in mind in becoming a leader in AI-led CX.

2021 customer service stat #3: Better data analytics means better CX

Many brands are beginning to truly realise the value of improving their contact centres’ performance through data visualisation. These tools, when used to drill down and measure KPIs against each other, can provide valuable insights that can’t be extracted by simply analysing single KPIs, such as average handling time, by themselves. They should be thought of as more than mere technical tools, however. Dashboard tools should be essential in formulating goals and objectives, as well as the KPIs needed to track progress such as CES and churn rate. Making dashboards the centre of contact centre strategies could lead to results like an 800 per cent rise in customer satisfaction and a 60 per cent reduction in churn for priority customers.

This testimonial by McKinsey is proof of said results: “One leading airline built a machine-learning system based on 1,500 customer, operations, and financial variables to measure both satisfaction and predicted revenue for its more than 100 million customers every day. The system allowed the airline to identify and prioritise those customers whose relationships were most at risk because of a delay or cancellation and offer them personalised compensation to save the relationship and reduce customer defection on high-priority routes.” The more that contact centre supervisors are willing to play with the numbers, the better the prospects for delivering top-tier CX will be. Odigo’s CCaaS solutions make use of dashboards that allow supervisors and managers to make the most informed decisions possible.

2021’s stats foresee the future of customer experience

The trends which endure beyond 2021 will not be about COVID-19, lockdowns and isolation; they will be about innovative solutions and aspiring to the best CX possible. Is your contact centre ready for the challenges of 2022? To learn more about personalised, seamless cloud-based Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) solutions, contact Odigo.