2020 What else can we say that hasn’t been said already? The year 2020 should be entered into the dictionary as a noun, a verb and an adjective to mark an era, the action of utter uncertainty and describe something that is unfathomable.
When we brainstorm our annual CX trends for the upcoming year, we look at the usual KPIs within our industry then suggest mostly incremental changes that businesses should focus on to keep up with consumer demands. This year, everything has changed. We saw whole industries that were completely shut down with no end in sight. Consumer demands shifted day-by-day, hour-by-hour as firms struggled to deal with the onslaught to their supply chains. And with an even greater move to “on-line”, consumers often found contact center personnel overwhelmed by an increase in calls and chats making customer service and business transactions more difficult. A recent 2020 IBM study found that the move to ecommerce was moved forward by 5 years due to the pandemic and McKinsey noted that the already blazing fast move to digital channels was vaulted forward by 5 years in only 8 weeks due to COVID. While it felt like much of the world and business stood still, trends already underway accelerated forward like never before.
So how did this all affect CX? Well, the dust hasn’t completely settled on the numbers, but we know that going forward, CX scores will be the gold standard by which everything else is measured. Another certainty is that on-prem CX platforms are on the way out as cloud contact center technology adoption has only accelerated with COVID. Companies that didn’t have cloud-based CX solutions in place (and there were a LOT of them) scrambled to find a patchwork solution and keep the lights on and deal with the new imperative of remote agents. Over the past year, things have looked pretty murky at times, but one thing is clear: businesses who do not adopt massive changes to their outdated CX strategies will become yet another casualty of 2020. Cloud technology that is nimble, maintains business continuity, and enables and empowers today’s new remote workers are the new table stakes to succeed.
For the 2021 CX Trends, we’re going to look past the pandemic into the near (hopefully) future and lay out a step-by-step blueprint of what the contact center should resemble. We’ll tackle the obvious changes like remote agents and cloud-based software, but we’ll also dig deeper into post-pandemic economics, advanced AI solutions and why software vendor relationships will be more important than ever.
Keep up with the hottest trends in CX in 2021. Check out Bright Pattern’s full guide “2021 Customer Experience Trends: The ABCs of the Post Pandemic Contact Center”
