The impact of COVID-19 on CX

Customer behaviour is increasingly unpredictable with ticket volumes fluctuating anywhere from -17% to +24% week-to-week during the global COVID-19 outbreak

Zendesk Benchmark Snapshot highlights the global impact of the current COVID-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic, which is being felt across markets by businesses and industries of all sizes around the world. Companies and governments are increasingly seeing significant spikes in requests for support, for example the week of 15-22 March saw a 20% increase in global tickets compared to the same period last year.

According to Zendesk’s Benchmark Snapshot, which has been analyzing the support interaction data of more than 20,000 global companies weekly since the outbreak, the three biggest industries that have seen spikes in support requests over the past three weeks are remote conferencing and learning (216%), airlines (199%), and grocery brands (39%).

Global markets are also seeing vast changes in customer behaviour, with individual countries seeing a strong correlation between the reporting of new Coronavirus cases and spikes in support requests. In Europe, the biggest impacts have not surprisingly been seen in Italy, Germany, and the UK; while markets across the Asia Pacific region are starting to see tickets stabilize as the number of cases decline in major markets like Singapore and Japan. Latin America has seen a surge in tickets in the past two weeks as it also responds to the global impact of the virus’s spread.

“Things are changing so fast right now, and in ways that feel increasingly difficult to predict. Business simply isn’t business as usual, and we’re prepared for things to continue this way for many months,” said Zendesk chief customer officer, Elisabeth Zornes. “It’s obvious this has created new challenges for companies and their customer experience teams, making it harder to keep up with what matters most to their business – their customers and employees. We are rolling out a number of free software solutions and resources that we hope will take some of that pain and pressure away.”