'All the channels have slightly different personalities and expectations, so chat's different than text, which is different than a social media channel like Twitter, which is different than a phone conversation,' Cleveland said.

Increasingly, there are elements of writing and speaking in the same interaction with a customer.īrad Cleveland Co-founder, International Customer Management Institute But it isn't necessarily high on management's priority list, even when the pandemic taught many companies harsh lessons about how thin agents could be stretched. Overlay on top of that typical contact center management emphasis on efficiency metrics, which increases pressure on agents to solve problems at first contact with a customer.Įmpathetic writing over chat, text, email and social channels is quickly becoming as valuable for contact center agents as projecting empathy over the phone, said Brad Cleveland, co-founder of the International Customer Management Institute. Yet several contact center trends are working against empathetic communications, because customers come in impatient and angry from the start: bots solve simple issues, so agents now field increasingly difficult problems from customers who have exhausted their patience getting past a company's automated call-deflection gatekeepers and recent labor shortages and supply chain issues, which flood contact center channels with customers irritated by circumstances beyond an agent's control.

Angry bots solve