Trends in contact

At a societal level the trend is for continued growth in the use of all contact channels:

• Web traffic
• Email
• Telephone
• Mobile phones and Text (SMS)
• Even post, although the growth is driven by direct mail rather than person-to-person or person-to-business contact.

Most organisations are experiencing an increase in contact from their customers. The drivers for this are:

• Increasing customer expectations to be able to make contact when and how they want to.
• New channels being opened up (especially web and email) and existing channels (especially telephone) being open for longer.
• Perceived time pressure: people don’t read the guidance notes they just phone for clarification, and they expect an increasingly quick response to post and email.
• Increasing rates of change in society: people change jobs, homes, partners, products, providers of services etc. ever more quickly.

The implications

The immediate consequence is increasing pressure on your Contact Centre. This in turn can mean increased cost as you hire more agents and/or increased pressure on your agents as you seek to get higher productivity from them.

Alternatively, it means greater difficulty for customers to get through resulting in a worse customer experience, loss of business and damage to your reputation.

How to respond

The fundamental insight is that not all customer contact is necessary and not all is valuable. Customer demand for contact does not have to be treated as a given and responded to. Some is pure waste and the goal can be – should be – to eliminate it.

Typical examples of contact with no value to either the customer or to the organisation are:

• Progress chasing.
• Requests for clarification.
• Requests to correct errors and mistakes.
• Misdirected calls.

The underlying reason for all these calls is the organisation’s failure to do something: to do it at all, to do it right or to do it within an expected time frame.

Often the root cause does not lie in the Contact Centre – it may be product design, back office performance, unclear communications – but it is in the Contact Centre that the consequences are felt. So you need to:

• Know what’s happening to overall levels of contact.
• Be clear what contact has value to you and to your customers – and what doesn’t.
• Be able to measure the extent of no value contact and understand what triggers it and what the root causes are.
• Develop a strategy for addressing the root causes.
• Monitor progress and identify new sources of no value contact as they arise.

or complete an enquiry form and find out how we can help reduce avoidable customer contact.