10 Strategies for Reducing Customer Call Volumes

10 Strategies for Reducing Customer Call Volumes A Call Centre Helper White Paper Sponsored by : Intelecom 1 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 2 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’. 3 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 4 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’. 5 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

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