"Of human virtues, patience is most great."
That statement has been attributed to Cato the Elder, the first-century B.C. Roman historian.
While the statement reveals the everyday struggle that humankind has had with the issue, Cato did not live in the digital age where instant gratification has become a lifestyle - and a bit of an individual right.
Worse, Cato never had to call a contact center.
Today, the contact center is the Petri dish where expectations and frustration meet. Where customers are a click away from the edge.
Impatience On the Rise in Contact Center CX
A 2022 Zendesk CX Accelerator report found that over the last 12 months, 66 percent of customers have become increasingly less patient with companies that are slow in adapting to shifting expectations.
The statistics are concerning.
The report indicates that average response times have also increased by 24 percent year-on-year, with more than 60 percent of companies taking more than an hour to respond to enquiries.
Combatting this in an era of recruitment woes is tricky. Yet, 90 percent of businesses have now implemented bots to route customers to the right place, attempting to match them with the best placed agents. In doing so, the hope is to solve queries faster and speed up call queues.
With this technology, businesses are dipping their toes in the water of conversational AI. In time, bots will likely play a much bigger part in customer experience.
The No Man's Land of the Queue
While routing is enabling better experiences, cumbersome IVR journeys remain a struggle. "Press 1 for sales, 2 for billing, press 3 for tech support." They quickly end up in an uncertain digital location where long wait times and poor queue messaging create the boil-over effect.
“Poor queue messaging occurs when a customer is told they can solve many of their questions on the website," said Richard Gregory, Senior Sales Executive at Odigo. "But most customers have already tried that. That's why they're calling the contact center in the first place. It's not their first stop," he explained.
Customers vent, which increases agent stress. That leads to poor performance, which leads to agent burnout.
The worst possible outcome is an unforgiving customer. At that point, they are at the edge of no return. They'll jump ship and go elsewhere.
Technology To the Rescue - Partially
There are no quick fixes. But with the appropriate application of CCaaS tools, contact centers are today mitigating the boiling point.
"The key is for businesses to do accurate planning," Gregory said. “Recognise that customers call in with expectations that are higher than ever.”
They want frictionless interactions, fast responses, and accurate answers.
But there is a caveat. There is a subtle balance between tools and technologies that facilitate a friction-free CX and human interactions on the other.