10 strategies for reducing customer call volumes

10 Strategies for Reducing Customer Call Volumes

A Call Centre Helper White Paper

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Section Page

Introduction 310 Strategies for Reducing Customer Call Volumes 1. Create Actionable Customer Journey Maps 5 2. Know Why Customers Are Contacting You 7 3. Proactively Manage the Customer Lifecycle 8 4. Shift Customers to Self-Service 9 5. Get It Right First Time 10 6. Act on Customer Insight 11 7. Make Customer Communications Clearer 11 8. Maintain a Unified View of the Customer 12 9. Create Self-Help Customer Videos and Forums 13 10. Effectively Use Customer Feedback 14Conclusion 15

Contents

3 10 Strategies for Reducing Customer Call Volumes

For the first time since Call Centre Helper began its annual survey in 2014 of “What Contact Centres are Doing Right Now” the percentage of inbound voice contacts that make up the overall number of contacts has decreased.

While this decline in voice calls has been predicted for many years what do the numbers really show? While inbound voice contacts have decreased by 6.1% in the last 12 months results in other parts of the survey show a clear shift by customers from voice to digital channels. This is endorsed by contact volumes as a percentage of overall contacts growing in terms of email, webchat, social media and SMS.

Call Centre Helper believes that the real challenge for customer contact managers is not simply to reduce call volumes 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, regardless of channel and drive up the number of contacts that provide true ‘customer value’.

Introduction

Strategies for Reducing Customer Call Volumes

10


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

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

1. Create Actionable Customer Journey Maps

10 Strategies for Reducing Customer Call Volumes6

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.


When Call Centre Helper last ran a poll which asked “What is the best way to understand Why Customers are Contacting You?” agents played a big part in the response.

The main results were as follows:

• Listening to calls 33%• Reason code in CRM or Knowledge Management System 28%• Ask your agents 21%• Customer Surveys 15%• The phone line called/IVR buttons pressed 3%

This response is supported by the 2017 Edition of the “What Contact Centres Are Doing Right Now” survey, which showed that over 80% of our contact centre professionals expect the presence of interaction analytics to increase within the industry over the next five to ten years. The majority of the 80% thought that this would “definitely” be the case, while the others agreed, but only “to some extent”.

If this were the case, it would fit the current trend, as the take-up of the technology has increased from 9.2% to 13.4% in the past year. Whatever method is used to understand why customers are calling, it is essential to know what those calls are about. Are they simple calls which could perhaps be handled by Interactive Voice Response, what percentage are repeat calls or how many are caused by a process failure in another part of the business? Introduce “Reason Codes” and ensure they are correctly collected and categorised. The same Poll asked “How do you collect reason codes?” and reassuringly the answers were:

• CRM System 45%• On Internal System 39%• Knowledge Management System 6%• On Paper 6%• Other 3%

Demand Categorisation can be done manually or by using technology. 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.

2. Know Why Customers Are Contacting You


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.

3. Proactively Manage the Customer Lifecycle


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:

• Interactive Voice Response (IVR) - where callers interact with a database to resolve their queries

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

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

• Web Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) pages

• Web page search

• Specialist help page search (e.g. for faults and technical support)

• Online virtual assistants (sometimes known as avatars) – these have been around for over a decade and often appear as an embedded widget on support pages inviting customers to engage via text in the hunt for answers

• Digital Assistants – you might know them as Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana and the like. These voice-based services have broken free from the confines of traditional devices such as laptops, desktops and smartphones and act as an intelligent interface for the Internet of Things (IoT) market and are at the leading edge in terms of natural language and machine learning

• Bots – a new arrival, bots have grabbed the headlines since their launch in 2016. They provide everything from recipe advice to hotel booking and are built upon a rising tide of messaging platforms such as Slack and Facebook Messenger.

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) therefore leading to improved customer interactions.

4. Shift Customers to Self-Service


The most effective way of reducing future service contact volumes is to resolve queries first time, on time and every time customers make contact.

Call Centre Helper readers suggest 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 createdby 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

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.

5. Get It Right First Time


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.

6. Act on Customer Insight

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

All of these can confuse customers, causing them to call for an explanation. Resolving these issues can significantly reduce inbound call volumes.

7. Make Customer Communications Clearer


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.

8. MaintainaUnifiedViewoftheCustomer


Online Customer Forums have for many years helped to reduce the volume of inbound customer contacts. In recent years the trend for videos on channels such has YouTube have become the first port of call for many with product or “how to” queries.

This has now followed through to customer service with videos embedded into the FAQ section of company websites as a means to allowing customers to help themselves.

Embedding self-help videos in the FAQ section of your website have two key advantages:

• The customer can work through the problem in their own time with a series of visual prompts, rather than having to decipher over-the-phone instructions, making it a much less stressful experience

• The majority of customers – if the video is done well – will be able to resolve their own problems. This should decrease the number of calls coming into your contact centre, and save your company time and money.

If you do add self-help videos to your website, it is recommended that you schedule regular checks into your calendar to ensure that only the most up-to-date information is given out to your customers. It is considered best practice to check any form of FAQ response at least every 4 weeks

Customer Forums can be more resource intensive and to make them 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.

9. CreateSelf-HelpCustomerVideosandForums


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.

10. EffectivelyUseCustomerFeedback


This white paper highlights ten strategies for Removing Unnecessary Customer Contacts.

They are to:

1. Create Actionable Customer Journey Maps 2. Know Why Customers Are Contact You 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 Videos and 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.

Conclusion

Puzzel builds on 20 years’ heritage. It was one of the first pioneers to develop a cloud-based contact center. Puzzle also encompasses leading mobile messaging and mobile payments to deliver a flexible and customisable customer interaction platform to meet the needs of today’s omni-channel and mobile environments. Puzzel can be adapted to accommodate from one to several thousand agents using any device, in any location and integrates with multiple applications seamlessly.

Headquartered in Oslo, Norway with offices in London, UK, Sweden, Finlandand Bulgaria, Puzzel is passionate about delivering innovative customer interaction solutions for contact centres and mobile environments. For more information please visit www.puzzel.com

About Puzzel

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