The study analyzed 22 million calls made on Ozonetel’s CloudAgent platform in 2022 by nearly 1,60,635 active agents.
Published Date – Sun, 18 Dec 22 at 06:40pm
Hyderabad: Improving customer satisfaction will remain a challenge through 2022. The “average time in line,” or the amount of time a caller waits in a call queue before being connected by a calling representative, is 56 seconds this year, compared to 45 seconds in 2021.
Increased queue times mean fewer agents for companies to handle calls. Companies need to either increase the number of agents in their call centers or enable those agents to complete calls faster, according to a study by city-based Ozonetel, which aims to provide a customer communication platform.
The study analyzed 22 million calls made on Ozonetel’s CloudAgent platform in 2022 by nearly 1,60,635 active agents. It covers inbound and outbound calls made on its platform from sectors such as e-commerce, restaurant and food delivery, insurance and fintech, banking, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, real estate and logistics call centers. Call centers are struggling to meet customer expectations this year, research finds.
Post-handling time, which indicates how quickly a call center agent can answer the next call after completing an action after each customer interaction, has increased from 40 seconds in 2021 to 46 seconds this year. The average post-processing time reported in 2019 was 25 seconds.
That means agents have increased post-call responsibilities, or call center managers have not yet been able to create new disposition codes for new post-pandemic customer inquiries.
The average agent response time in 2022 has dropped to 7.7 seconds, compared to 8 seconds in 2021. This suggests that there may be less idle time between agents than before. Average talk time remained unchanged at 3.7 minutes. It was a conversation of almost 500 words.
Conversations of this length are unlikely to take place through digital channels. This reiterates the relevance of voice as a sales channel for support and consultation. On the other hand, transactional conversations have migrated to digital channels such as chat and WhatsApp, highlighting the need for an omnichannel strategy, the study said.
The average connection rate this year is 39%, compared to 46% in 2021. However, in the restaurant and food delivery industry, 96% of calls go through to potential customers, compared to 54% in 2021. A drop in answer rate indicates that potential customers are unwilling to answer the phone. These numbers show that customers are less likely than ever to answer promotional calls from unknown phone numbers.
On the other hand, high connection rates in the food and e-commerce industries indicate that customers are more comfortable taking transactional calls than promotional calls. Verified caller ID for business ensures higher customer attention and lower call rejection rates, it said. In 2022, the abandonment rate, or the number of calls that are not answered by an agent while the caller is disconnected in the call queue, is 34%. 29% in 2021 and 12% in 2019. Customers are impatient.
“Voice remains an important channel for customer support and consultative sales, but that doesn’t mean it’s business as usual within the call center industry,” said Chaitanya Chokkareddy, chief product officer at Ozonetel.
“Without long-term strategies such as automation, calls moving to new-age digital channels such as WhatsApp, and investment in customer-facing, agent-facing and supervisor-facing AI and analytics, contact centers cannot meet customer expectations,” he said.
