12 Customer Experience Statistics for Creating an Agile Service Model

For a strong customer experience, contact centers need to adopt an agile approach to support. Lean on these customer experience statistics.

As a result of the pandemic, organizations have adopted new ways of doing business, from curbside pickup to social media shopping. In fact, companies across various industries have seen online channel adoption grow by 15-40%. Additionally, 75% of customers who report using digital channels for the first time say they plan to continue doing so even after things return to “normal” post-pandemic.

Why Adopt an Agile Contact Center Strategy?

The new customer experience is both digital and agile, existing across multiple channels. When different channels work in sync, this enables teams across digital, strategy, and contact center operations to efficiently collaborate without customer needs falling through the cracks. Contact centers that adopt an agile experience that also injects a thoughtful digital experience increases customer loyalty, builds trust, and drives more profitable business.

Support a Stronger Customer Experience 

An agile approach to contact centers aims to seamlessly integrate with other components of the customer care process, resulting in a supportive end-to-end customer experience. Identifying ways to eliminate channel silos and thus adopt an omnichannel experience will instill customer confidence in your organization. 

Collaborate Closely With Teams to Deliver Rapid Solutions

As you eliminate channel silos, it will be easier to invest in refining contact center processes, agent feedback and training, and transparency across teams. When you make these investments, agents will be better equipped to deliver quick and effective solutions for customers seeking support.

Maximize First Call Resolution Potential 

Lean on text analytics to pull real-time feedback from customers to identify the most common pain points they seek out support on. Integrating this feedback into your plan for establishing an agile contact center can prioritize solving this customer challenge via training and new procedures so as to increase its first-call resolution. 

These 12 customer experiences stats illustrate the urgency of why brands need to close the gap between their digital and traditional customer service channels to improve customer experiences.

Customer Experience Statistics on Leveraging Digital Channels

1. Digital channel adoption has grown by 15% to 40%, across industries, as a result of changing consumer behavior related to the pandemic.

2. 75% of the people who report having tried out digital channels for the first time say they intend to continue doing so even after their routines return to “normal.”

Why It Matters: During this time of shifting customer behavior, it’s important to keep track of what’s working (and what’s not), especially for new users who may be unfamiliar with how these digital experiences are intended to work. They may need more help getting through the sign-up or check-out process, for instance, and your company’s contact center data and insights may shed light on any potential areas in which users are experiencing breakdowns in the customer experience, underscoring where there’s room for improvement.

Customer Experience Trends Advocating for Omnichannel Experiences

3. 75% of customers want to have consistent experiences, no matter which department they’re communicating with.

4. 58% report feeling as if they’re interacting with separate departments and not one single company.

5. 70% expect all of the customer service representatives they come in contact with to have the same information about them, but 64% report that they have to re-explain the issues they’re experiencing.

Why It Matters: It is vital for brands to offer frictionless customer experiences across the entire customer journey, and currently nurturing each phase of this journey has fallen short of a priority. Companies that make key customer data widely available to all teams will be better positioned to develop and consistently execute CX solutions that saves both the customer and employees time and frustration.

Get All Teams Working Towards the Same CX Goal to Decrease Friction

6. In 2012, as detailed in a new book, Expedia was receiving up to 20 million customer service calls. At roughly $5 per call, that added up to $100 million.

7. About 58% of customers who booked a trip with the company ended up calling customer service afterward for help.

Why it Matters: The No. 1 reason people were calling Expedia’s customer service was because they simply couldn’t access their itinerary through the company’s website. Different teams focused on their own individual goals, which meant the ultimate goal of a positive total customer experience fell through the cracks. No single team had ownership of solving this simple (and pervasive) issue. The company has since employed efforts to pinpoint where the breakdown in the digital customer experience was taking place, address the root cause online, and improve the overall customer experience, leading to a significant drop in calls from 58% to 15%.

Improve Digital Experiences at the Root to Help Customers Down the Line

8. One retailer, a Medallia client, found that 70% of its contact center calls were a direct result of digital self-service issues.

9. Another Medallia client in the financial services industry estimated that increasing digital visits by just 2% to 5% could help it save up to $1 million in contact center costs.

10. 22% of repeat call volume is related to a problem that prompted an original call, even if that problem itself was adequately addressed the first time around.

11. Reducing contact center calls by 200,000, enabled one Medallia client in the insurance industry to reduce employee work hours by 16,000, enabling the company to reassign more than 10 FTEs to other tasks.

Why it Matters: When web and mobile app experiences are broken, confusing, or incomplete, customer calls will increase. Companies that take the time to address underlying causes — such as by fixing bugs or adding helpful FAQs or how-to videos — can improve digital self service, reduce call volume and save costs. Proactively improving these experiences by leveraging social listening or text analytics to extract the questions and pain points customers truly want answers to will help prevent repeat issues. 

12. The majority of organizations only monitor about 1% of all contact center calls, says Rachel Lane, Contact Center Solution Principal for Medallia, from what she has seen throughout her career. When businesses monitor only 1% of their customer calls, they’re missing out on 99% of the picture! That has ramifications not only for the contact center customer experience, but the overall customer experience.

As these customer experience stats show, organizations have the potential to unlock and share insights captured within call centers and share them company-wide to improve a myriad of customer channels, from in-store and delivery to mobile and online. 

Learn more about Medallia’s ability to optimize contact center performance and improve the total customer experience.