Voice remains critical for customer support, consultative sales

The study analysed 22 million calls made on Ozonetel’s CloudAgent platform by nearly 1,60,635 active agents in 2022.

Hyderabad: Driving customer satisfaction has been challenging through 2022. The ‘average time in queue’ or the amount of time callers wait in a call queue before they are connected to representatives, was 56 seconds this year compared to 45 seconds in 2021.

Increasing queue times mean the company has less number of agents to deal with the calls. Businesses either need to increase the number of agents within their call centers or enable these agents to wrap calls faster, said a study conducted by city-based Ozonetel, which is into providing customer communication platforms.

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The study analysed 22 million calls made on Ozonetel’s CloudAgent platform by nearly 1,60,635 active agents in 2022. It covered inbound and outbound calls made on its platform across e-commerce, restaurants and food delivery, insurance and fintech, banking, healthcare and pharma, real estate and logistics call centers. The study found that call centers struggled this year to meet customer expectations.

The wrap time, which indicates how fast call center agents attend to the next call after completing actions post each customer interaction, increased to 46 seconds this year from 40 seconds in 2021. The average wrap time reported in 2019 was 25 seconds.

This means that agents’ responsibilities post-call have increased or that call center managers have not yet been able to create new disposition codes for the new post-pandemic customer queries.

The average agent speed of answer has reduced to 7.7 seconds in 2022 as compared to 8 seconds in 2021. This indicating the agents may have less idle time between calls than before. The average talk time remained constant at 3.7 minutes. That is a conversation of nearly 500 words.

It is unlikely that conversations of this length could have taken place via digital channels. This reiterates the relevance of voice as a channel for support and consultative sales. Transactional conversations have, on the other hand, moved to digital channels such as chat and WhatsApp underlining the need for an omnichannel strategy, the study said.

The average connection rate this year was 39% compared to 46% in 2021. However, in the restaurant and food delivery industry, 96% of calls connected to a prospect as compared to 54% in 2021. Decreasing answer rates indicate that prospects are unwilling to take calls. The numbers indicate that customers are more unlikely than ever to answer a promotional call from an unknown phone number.

On the other hand, the high connection rates within the food and e-commerce industry indicate that customers are happy to answer transactional calls rather than promotional ones. A verified business caller ID can ensure higher customer attention and lower call rejection, it said. Abandonment rate, or how many calls go unanswered by agents as callers disconnect while in the call queue, stood at 34% in 2022. This was 29% in 2021 and 12% in 2019. Customers were not patient to wait.

“Voice remains a critical channel for customer support and consultative sales, but this does not mean that it is business-as-usual within the call center industry,” said Ozonetel Chief Product Officer Chaitanya Chokkareddy.

“Contact centers cannot meet customer expectations without long-term strategies such as automation, call deflection to new-age digital channels such as WhatsApp, and without investing in customer-facing, agent-facing, and supervisor-facing AI and analytics,” he said.