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. 2020 describes the action of utter uncertainty and 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 disruption to their supply chains. And with an even greater move to “online”, 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-premise 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, 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but one thing is clear: businesses who do not adopt massive changes to their outdated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.