Since the COVID-19 outbreak, customers have been forced to abandon traditional stores and businesses, stay home, and carry out online purchases. This shift caused a large volume of unprecedented calls to swarm call centers since customers had to do most of the things online, resulting in a 34% increase in the time customers were put on hold.

Although digitization has proved to be quite beneficial for both businesses and the customers, one thing that it led to is a rapid transformation that left the businesses thinking about how they can ensure a good customer experience.

How Did Call Centers Respond To The Digitization During COVID?
To limit the spread of the virus, call center agents began working remotely. These changes in their working environment affected how they used to work before the spread of COVID with access to all the relevant technologies and software.

Customers now expect organizations to prioritize them because they do not want to be put on hold for long periods of time as agents transfer calls to the relevant department; instead, they must come up with a unified plan that addresses their concerns and complaints adequately.

These unexpected shifts in contact center processes and increasing customer need for assistance on matters like appointment cancellations, insurance claims, and guidance on COVID-19 created a sharp rise in demand.

Digital Transformation and Enhanced Customer Experience
To get the most out of a call center, you can do quite a few things to give your customer’s a better experience. Consumer experiences are heavily linked to how good they feel when making a purchase online.

With the rapid digitization of most retail shops, consumers are looking for ways to find instant gratification that pleases them and replicates what they would otherwise see in physical stores.

With this new advancement, consumer contact centers play a huge role in delivering customer experience as most purchases are made by customers online. The most prominent way digital transformation has changed user experience is by allowing agents to make the calls more personalized.

Although it is said that automation plays a key factor in maximizing customer experience, it still needs to be paired with human agents who can understand what a customer wants when they get in touch with contact centers.

Sending out automated texts using an AI is great, and it may solve customer inquiries to some extent, but it is not enough on its own. Human agents with access to knowledge about a company’s operation can guide the customers well, ensuring that customers do not leave disappointed by the way their issues were addressed.

The Takeaway!
Due to COVID-19, contact centers are actively becoming more technologically advanced and strategic, which is likely to boost their importance considering how they improve the overall customer experience. In addition, these advancements could help them remove any hurdles that may be affecting the service negatively.

COVID-19 has pushed organizations to reevaluate their contact center strategies by incorporating newer, more advanced digital tools to enhance the customer experience even during the pandemic.