The last couple of weeks left many of us worried; COVID infection numbers are getting higher, panic is widespread, restrictions and lockdowns are being put in place, and there is big uncertainty on what is happening to the economy.

Our company happens to offer a SaaS product that is a complete hosted solution for contact-center analytics. It is especially popular with small and medium businesses, most of which would not consider themselves in any sense a “call center”; still, as a part of their operations they maintain a pool of agents to answer the phone and need real-time and historical visibility on their levels of service. For both technical and regulatory issues, we run it from a number of “server clusters” around the world, each of which serves a specific geographic area. Quite coincidentally, this puts us in an interesting position to see what went on in the last few weeks.

In VoIP circles, private rumor has it that the total call volume is going up sigificantly, especially to mobiles, and those poor souls who do video conferencing are busy provisioning new systems all of the time. This is quite expected: a lot of people are working from home, and they are using (and buying) the tools they need to keep on working; and millions of students are learning to use video as a substitute for classroom time. But what is happening to the inbound lines of SMBs, where their customers call in to place orders and schedule appointments?

In Europe, our largest cluster, our customers are mostly located in the UK, France and Germany. Its traffic, up to a couple of weeks ago, was pretty normal and growing in line with new customers being activated. On the week ending on March 21st, it started going down about 10% on the previous one, and in the last week it was down over 25% on two weeks before. Surely a part of these contacts went through different channels (e-mail) or were delayed, but the sheer magnitude of these number means that business in Europe is impacted significantly. SMBs are operating, as the volumes of requests for monitoring is showing just a small contraction, but the calls their teams are processing are significantly reduced. In the graph above, showing the last three weeks in one of our European data pipelines, you can see how usage (green line) is pretty much stable, while new calls processed (yellow line) are noticeably lower.

In the US cluster, also serving Latin America, so far we are not seeing much of a reduction of call volume. It would be hard to tell, as the we are seeing a double-digit increase of adoption of both our services and their average usage. It looks like SMBs are getting ready to monitor their contact centres when reps are fully remote, but are not yet feeling the chilling effect of lockdowns.

We also run a smaller cluster in South Africa, that caters to a very lively local market; while the week of the 14th showed just a -0.7% that could be a random fluctuation, as the county went into lockdown by the middle of last week, there was a very visible reduction in calls processed, by the tune of almost 40%. This seems to match the experience of some South African telephony providers who reported large call volume reductions for Thursday and Friday.

What is happening? First, in places where a lockdown was started, people and businesses are putting off new “cold-call” contacts - the ones that typically go through a team. Secondarily, people seems to be unsure of which business are currently operational and how they can be reached.

So, while there is not much one can do for the first reason, it would definitely be advisable to make it clear whether your company can be contacted and which are the best ways to do it.

About QueueMetrics-Live

QueueMetrics-Live is available as a cloud hosted service for FreePBX, Grandstream UCM, Yeastar, Issabel, FusionPBX and many other Asterisk and Freeswitch distros. It is also run as a white-label solution for telcos of all sizes.

Visit www.queuemetrics-live.com for a free 30-day trial.

We also have Free Webinars for a live demonstration of how QueueMetrics can be effective in managing your remote contact center.

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