About two months ago, at the end of March 2020, we released a first article that analyzed what was going on within the contact centres of SMBs in Europe, Americas and South Africa. All the big economies in Europe had just started their shut-downs, each with their different twist, and the results were immediatley apparent. In the last week of March, call volume was down 25% on two weeks before, and very black clouds were appearing on the horizon. Now, at last, we can see a ray of light.

As a reader of this blog, you are likely aware that Loway offers a SaaS product called QueueMetrics Live 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. So we are in an enviable position to pinpoint what is happening in each of them - we literally can see orders coming in.

In Europe, the contraction started by the end of March peaked by the middle of April, where call volumes were only about 70% of what they were one month earlier. SMBs were operational and we had not seen shutdowns yet - if anything, a significant amount of new business expressed interest and adopted the solution, and our support and sales teams had to work extra hard. After the middle of April, things started growing again, slowly at first and now more quickly; in the week of May 5th was the first one where we saw numbers that were over the traffic in March, and by last week, at last, figures were about 15% higher than before the slump. This means SMBs, especially in central Europe, are getting calls again and re-capturing some lost opportunities.

In the USA cluster, that also servers many business located in Latin America, things have been quite hectic. There has been major growth in the user base, with a few interesting large projects and a majority of smaller systems - again, mostly SMBs that were empowering their remote workers. Considering only existinbg customer that started up before the Covid crisis, we saw steadly levels of traffic, with no reductions of European scale.

Our friends in South Africa were not so fortunate. The call volume has been down around (and over!) 50% for all April, compared to averages before the lock-down, and while we are starting to see signs of improvement, they are still 40% down on normal call volumes. We saw relatively little activity in terms of new prospects, rather different from the lively situation that South Africa usually shows.

Asia has seen significant growth - it is our smallest cluster (it launched only in Q4 2019), and has been growing mostly with new customers. Existing ones did not anyway have a reduction since March, and we see a lot of interest and potential for the solution.

What is happening? most likely, the improving climate in Europe is making people more confident, and even where there is still a strict lock-down in place, things can be postponed only up to a point and are starting to pick up again. As a contact center and even more as a SMB in general, it is important that you are prepared to serve your customers professionally as soon as they pick up their phone again - and they are starting to. For now, let’s keep our fingers crossed and we’ll follow the evolution closely.

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 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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