Home > Columns > CRM Columns

There’s a looming recession. Can GigCX help businesses?

By Megan Neale, COO, Limitless

According to Bloomberg, the US economy will likely fall into a mild recession by the end of 2022. 

Now is the time to prepare customer service plans for a potential recession. The most agile leaders will look at ways to optimize the resources they have, while searching for avenues that provide a lower cost to serve. 

That said, leveraging gig experts for your customer service may be the alternative that your business needs to weather changes in the world. In fact, for McKinsey GigCX is one of the next big developments in customer experience, offering companies a more flexible, scalable, and affordable model for customer experience.

With GigCX, brands can harness the real-life experience and empathy of their customers, using them to help achieve higher customer satisfaction at a significantly lower cost than traditional contact centers.

The GigCX model, in which Brand Advocates work on an on-demand basis from anywhere, offers a dramatic reduction of cost-to-serve by removing the need for the fixed resourcing models. Not only does this mean GigCX operates at a significantly reduced cost but the advantages of rewarding your own customers for helping others is powerful at a time when all consumers are struggling with the rise in cost of living. 

According to industry research, knowledge bases are preferred over all other self-service channels, whilst millennials’ preferred customer service channel is live chat. If we add to that the fact that over 90% of US consumers look at a company’s customer service as a key aspect for doing business with them, and over a quarter of consumers would switch companies immediately after a bad customer experience, it is clear that having the right people in charge of your customer service is more important than ever.

And this is where GigCX experts could play a pivotal role. 

Change in type and volume of customer demands – demands on customer service agents and GigCX Experts have not only increased but also changed. Max Ball, Principal Industry Analyst, Forrester notes that “today, agents are getting a much higher volume of calls, and those calls are more difficult and challenging to deal with”. Notably, our recent survey showed that 82% of GigCX Experts surveyed felt the nature of customer service queries has changed over the pandemic, such as people wanting added services, faster answers, and more personalized contact. 

In such cases having GigCX Experts can be more beneficial because:

1.  Customers are getting advice from experts who often have a better understanding of user issues, having used the product or service extensively, than contact center employees, who may not have the in-depth knowledge of power users after training.

Genesys’ Marijn te Booij calls this “the conversation function” to explain the fact that customers prefer to take product advice from other customers rather than the brand itself and compares it to the concept of “a peer who is helping you, or explaining something to you that you didn’t yet know, in a very relatable way”. 

2.  Their motivation of helping others comes before earning more money. “There have always been people who get a genuine buzz out of helping other people, but now they are being compensated for that, and helping to improve the customer experience formally and it can be done at scale.”

Costs in retaining and attracting staff – In 2021 contact center attrition rate was 42% which, according to NICE WEM Global Survey, although this industry doesn’t seem to have suffered from the Great Resignation, it still equates to millions of dollars of losses. 

The worrying point is that only 30% of companies surveyed said they were actively investing in retention.  The (not so) surprising point is that for 47% of agents, flexible scheduling is a key requirement to make them stay in the job.  Adding to that is the fact that, according to a recent survey, 62% of customer service managers said they have had to increase recruitment spend in order to meet staffing minimums. 

This is where GigCX’s agility and flexibility can help businesses to scale up as and when they need to do so – whether to support peak seasons or special new product launches. It provides a level of flexibility that will act as a significant supplement to traditional contact centers. Serving customers with an agile pay as you go model also helps lower costs as brands only pay for resolved queries, not per active Expert. 

The GigCX model is inevitable – and it is not just us saying this, 83% of CX leaders interviewed for our recent survey said so. The benefits it can bring are enormous, particularly at times of uncertainty and of financial difficulties, GigCX can provide reliable resources that flex with demand in volume while still ensuring high customer satisfaction and create a truly customer centric operating model. A win-win for all, for consumers and for brands.