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10 Strategies for Reducing Customer Call Volumes

A Call Centre Helper White Paper Sponsored by : Intelecom

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Contents

Introduction ......................................................................................................... 3

10 Strategies for Reducing Customer Call Volumes ................................................ 4

1. Create Actionable Customer Journey Maps ..................................................... 4

2. Categorise Customer Demand ........................................................................ 5

3. Proactively Manage the Customer Lifecycle .................................................... 6

4. Shift Customers to Self-Service ....................................................................... 6

5. Get It Right First Time ..................................................................................... 7

6. Act on Customer Insight ................................................................................. 8

7. Make Customer Communications Clearer ....................................................... 8

8. Maintain a Unified View of the Customer ....................................................... 9

9. Create Self-Help Customer Forums ................................................................. 9

10. Effectively Use Customer Feedback ............................................................. 10

Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 11

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Introduction

According to research Customer Contact Association (CCA), 27 percent of customer contacts are ‘unnecessary’, with the figure as high as 40 percent in some organisations.

Unnecessary contacts are estimated to cost the typical UK contact centre around £6.75 million a year.

According to the survey, the most common reasons for unnecessary contacts are:

Chasing calls: calls from customers who are unsure of deliveries, application processes or next actions from organisations

Unclear communication and marketing: Calls received as a result of poor outbound communication including complicated pricing, complex legislative information, or over-detailed forms

Call centre failure: resulting from scenarios where agents have neglected to take an action, not followed up or incorrectly undertaken a task.

It’s an interesting insight into why customer calls are occurring. However, the whole logic behind the survey is that certain customer calls (and contacts) are ‘unnecessary’? Is that correct? Or is ‘unnecessary’ the wrong word because there are always good reasons why customers make contact. Call Centre Helper believes that the real challenge for customer contact managers is not simply to reduce unnecessary contacts but to remove contacts that provide no customer value and that are ‘preventable’. And, we contend, any strategy that focuses on removing contacts that are preventable should focus on removing contacts that are ‘predictable’. Clearly, a contact that arises because of a customer’s unique situation, such as a set of events that occur on a particular day, or a freak accident, is very difficult to predict - and hence prevent. However, contacts that happen for multiple customers for the same reasons and at similar points on their Customer Journey Maps (see Strategy One), or because of the same broken processes, can in theory be more easily prevented. In this Call Centre Helper White Paper we discuss ways in which organisations can reduce the number of preventable calls, and other live agent contacts, they receive and drive up the number of contacts that provide true ‘customer value’.

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10 Strategies for Reducing Customer Call Volumes

1. Create Actionable Customer Journey Maps A growing number of service organisations are using Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) to improve customer experiences. For many, however, their activities are restricted to:

• Creating Process Maps that define the internal processes used to deliver services at each stage of the customer journey (i.e. product research, purchase, delivery, maintenance, renewal etc.) with a view to optimising these processes

• Root Cause analysis to discover why customer contacts occur; together with Process Transformation and Improvement to ensure preventable contacts don’t occur again

Call Centre Helper believes that the service industry is only scratching the surface of how it can use CJM techniques to improve customer experiences. Here are 10 tips for creating more powerful and actionable Customer Journey Maps:

1. Map Customer Journeys from the customers’ perspective (i.e. what THEY do to achieve their goals) and not from the organisational perspective (i.e. what processes YOU use to deliver services). The former will occur over time, in phases, and possibly over multiple channels – and is often referred to as ‘the Customer Purpose’.

2. Identify key customer types for each major product/service grouping (e.g. by age, requirement, frequency of use) and create separate CJMs for each

3. Interview a sample of customers in each grouping

4. Involve internal and third party stakeholders (sales, marketing, production, service, finance, maintenance, outsourced partners etc.)

5. Identify ‘moments of truth’ (including points at which important decisions are made) and consider customer emotions (i.e. times when customers maybe anxious, unhappy, frustrated etc. – as these are times when improvements can hugely influence customer experiences)

6. Analyse information from all customer touchpoints, as well as customer feedback, to get the full picture

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7. Include non-customers when considering the pre-sales elements of CJMs

8. Make CJMs ‘actionable’. A CJM should be more than just a pictorial representation of an ideal customer journey. It should provide internal departments and partners with a framework under which they can plan future enhancements, identify potential bottlenecks/problems, and proactively improve customer experiences

9. Get all stakeholders to review CJMs and validate or invalidate initial thinking

10. Use a suitable presentation package. A detailed CJM isn’t something that can adequately be presented via Powerpoint. Consider the use of full wall displays in your offices

Ultimately ask yourself “What are people looking to achieve by buying our products/services and contacting our customer service department?”

By fully understanding a customer’s ‘purpose’ for making contact, you will stand a better chance of eliminating failures in customer delivery processes AND increasing the number of positive contacts that provide a true customer value.

2. Categorise Customer Demand By undertaking Root Cause Analysis on calls where something has gone wrong, organisations can identify bottlenecks and broken processes, and ensure problems don’t re-occur. By analysing and categorising Customer Demand, however, they can go further by ensuring ‘failure demand’ contacts never occur in the first place.

One such Customer Demand Categorisation technique, the CORE technique from Lloyd Parry, advocates segmenting customer contacts into four categories:

CREATE contacts that deliver value effectively to both parties

OPPORTUNITY contacts that create opportunities to develop new products/services

REMEDIAL contacts that occur when a process or product/service goes wrong

EXTERNAL contacts that represent waste or demand generated by third parties

By identifying ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ contacts, the technique has helped organisations strategically focus on new opportunities, resolve issues and remove contact centre ‘waste’.

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According to Lloyd Parry, as much as 50-70 per cent of incoming customer contacts are generated by failures within systems and products.

Demand Categorisation can be done manually but is much quicker when technology is used to aid the process. By asking advisors to record details of contacts into CRM or similar database systems, organisations can more easily highlight avoidable contacts, assess where they come from, and analyse why they are occurring.

3. Proactively Manage the Customer Lifecycle By using Customer Journey Mapping and Demand Categorisation, organisations can identify points when customers typically make contact with problems and queries.

Using Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) they can then proactively manage these situations, for example with new customer welcome calls, promotional offers, courtesy calls, health check calls and loyalty incentives.

The importance of proactive CLM in building Call Elimination Strategies should not be overlooked. Many customer contact events (for example, customers upgrading and churning) occur at key points within contract periods so are often predictable. Likewise, the root cause of many problems that occur amongst ‘mature’ customers often relate to things that occur, or are said, when they first become customers (such as an expectation set by a salesperson) again, making them predictable if appropriate analysis is used.

Companies should also not underestimate the importance of proactive CLM strategies in building customer experiences – especially when customers are rewarded for their loyalty.

4. Shift Customers to Self-Service When organisations can accurately predict why customers are calling, dramatic reductions in inbound call volumes can be achieved by shifting customers to self-service channels. These may include:

• Web page search • Specialist help page search (e.g. for faults and technical support) • Online ordering and bill payment facilities • Web Q&A pages • Online virtual assistants (avatars) • Interactive Voice Response (where callers interact with a database to

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resolve their queries) • Interactive Voice Response (where pre-recorded messages are used

to resolve queries) • Visual IVR (where web or Smartphone interfaces are used to access IVR

services) To create effective online self-service, facilities must be easy to access and log into, easy to navigate and deliver all the information required to resolve customer queries. A ‘divert to live operator’ option should be provided to cater for situations where customers aren’t able to get to the information they need to fully answer queries.

As web technology becomes more ‘intelligent’ and organisations get better at anticipating customer needs, the use of self-service will undoubtedly rise. Not only does it offer significant cost advantages over live operator service but it can also be faster and more convenient (especially as it’s often available 24/7/365).

5. Get It Right First Time There’s no more effective way of reducing future service contact volumes than by resolving queries first time, on time and every time customers make contact.

In a recent article, Call Centre Helper readers suggested a number of ways to improve first contact resolution. Here are ten of them:

a. Monitor the scenarios where advisors have to say ‘no’ and review and improve processes or policies that drive this response

b. Cross-train advisors, ensure they are fully aware of the company’s products and services and empower them to deal with a wide variety of issues without having to pass them onto others. ‘Smarten up’ not ‘dumb down’ your people.

c. Ask customers ‘have I resolved your issue today?’ and measure ‘customer effort’ in post call IVR surveys.

d. Where customers express dissatisfaction, contact them and find out how things can be improved

e. Track unresolved issues, then train and empower agents to resolve them. Do this constantly and make it a KPI

f. Measure the right things. Consider removing Average Handle Time as a KPI to enable advisors to build customer rapport, improve the customer journey and go ‘above and beyond’ to drive improved first call resolution. Look to measure ‘customer value’ in as many ways as practicable. Not just by measuring customer satisfaction but by looking at first-call resolution and at the value created by providing customers with additional products and services.

g. Create a knowledge base to cover all products so advisors are reading off the same hymn sheet

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h. Listen to advisors to understand what is driving contacts. Give advisors a feedback loop into management.

i. Use an IVR service to get customers to the right place and get them there quickly. IVR choices should be simple and intuitive.

j. Simplify the agent desktop to enable advisors to provide a single point of access to the mission-critical applications and tools required to effectively complete a customer interaction.

6. Act on Customer Insight The information contained within customer contacts says a lot about the relationships between your organisation and its customers.

Information that, if mined and used appropriately, can assist in better understanding customer needs, improving call scripts and advisor training, resolving problems and enhancing business processes.

To take advantage of this opportunity, bring together information from as many sources as possible (e.g. call and email handling systems, workforce and performance management systems, call recording and quality management systems, etc.), analyse that data, share knowledge, create actions and then deliver those actions in a timely manner.

Analytics technology is improving all the time and the latest generation of speech analytics solutions represents a giant step forward – giving quality managers an automated method of analysing thousands of calls in near real time to spot trends, identify events and produce insights to improve future contact handling.

Use analytics tools such as Google Analytics to consistently track web site visits and user experiences over time to assess what is working and what isn’t, what new content is required, and where future development is best focused.

7. Make Customer Communications Clearer Unclear communication and marketing is one of the key reasons for unnecessary customer calls.

Any poor outbound communication, whether it be:

• complicated pricing • unclear legislative information • badly laid-out forms • confusion over delivery dates, or • badly-worded standard letters and bills

can confuse customers, causing them to call for an explanation. Resolving these

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issues can significantly reduce inbound call volumes.

8. Maintain a Unified View of the Customer Above, we discussed simplifying the agent desktop to enable advisors to provide a single point of access to the mission-critical applications and tools required to effectively complete a customer interaction. In order to deliver a seamless omnichannel experience, it’s also key to give advisers a single view of customer activity across all channels. Advisers need to know that the person they are speaking to over the phone is the same person who emailed yesterday and made contact via Twitter the day before – and they need to know and understand the nature of those conversations to avoid going over the same issues and wasting time. The same logic needs to apply to self-service resources where applicable. It can also help considerably when the advisor knows the customer and is aware of previous buying history, customer preference and previous service issues. So a single point of contact for Account Management can help. Together, a unified desktop, single view of the customer and single point of contact can dramatically improve service quality, first time fixes and hence reduce the need for future unnecessary customer contacts.

9. Create Self-Help Customer Forums Many organisations have successfully reduced the volume of inbound customer contacts – as well as slashed service costs – by switching the focus of their customer service to Online Customer Support Communities. giffgaff, a Mobile Virtual Network Operator, provides an excellent example of how this works in practice. giffgaff doesn’t offer customers a dedicated customer service phone line. Instead, complaints and problems are handled via an online message board system with many queries answered by giffgaff community ‘members’ who help out in areas such as customer service, sales and marketing and are rewarded with offers and cashback. While dedicated giffgaff support staff monitor this service forum, their workload is drastically reduced by the efforts of community members. Not only does giffgaff benefit from cost savings (comparable to shifting customers to self-service) but customers benefit too through (1) cheaper service costs and (2) high class customer service (i.e. they can ask complex questions and have them handled by knowledgeable online experts).

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To make your Member Support Communities work effectively, consider:

• Moderating public forums: While the forum is a fantastic way for customers to share experiences and knowledge there are still times when intervention is required. For example, to resolve a misunderstanding, to correct inaccurate advice, or to prevent a situation getting out of control. Technical specialists should be encouraged to review and contribute to debates, including pointing members towards additional resources

• Re-using content: Public forum debates generate vast quantities of useful content so it’s important to regularly review content and use community content to add to online knowledge base libraries.

10. Effectively Use Customer Feedback Another excellent way of reducing future contact is to find out what your customers are thinking and then act on that information.

Don’t just restrict your investigation to asking customers what they think of their last service experiences. Ask them:

what they were looking to achieve through purchasing your products and services

when they contact your organisation, why they do so whether your knowledge base covers the main areas of interest to them Why online shopping baskets were abandoned

This is qualitative information that you won’t necessarily be able to glean from analysing past customer interactions or post call IVR (or web) surveys.

Build feedback tools into systems to give customers as many opportunities as possible to provide feedback – e.g. when they are researching new products on your web site, registering a new product, upgrading or seeking online or live agent support.

Find a consistent way to collate and analyse feedback and circulate the results widely.

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Conclusion This white paper highlights ten strategies for Removing Unnecessary Customer Contacts. They are to: 1. Create Actionable Customer Journey Maps 2. Categorise Customer Demand 3. Proactively Manage the Customer Lifecycle 4. Shift Customers to Self-Service 5. Get It Right First Time 6. Act on Customer Insight 7. Make Customer Communications Clearer 8. Maintain a Unified View of the Customer 9. Create Self-Help Customer Forums 10. Effectively Use Customer Feedback By following these ten simple strategies, organisations can reduce future demand for live agent service by better understanding why customers are buying their products/services and making contact, acting on their feedback, addressing broken processes, more effectively handling contacts and proactively managing relationships throughout the customer lifecycle.

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About Intelecom Intelecom is a leading provider of contact management solutions. With over 17 years' experience, Intelecom was one of the first to develop a cloud-based contact centre. Highly flexible and scalable, Connect from Intelecom can be adapted to accommodate from one to several thousand concurrent agents using any device, in any location and integrates with multiple applications seamlessly. Intelecom Connect is one of the few contact centre solutions that is completely multi-channel. Intelecom Connect agents can respond to Phone, Email, Chat, Social Media and SMS enquiries all within the one application. For more information please visit www.intele.com