Don't Call Us, We'll Call You
Organizations that want to lower their services costs (that would be all of them...) should work harder at avoiding those calls and emails in the first place--and not by removing the contact information from their website. According to Bill Price, author of The Best Service Is No Service, businesses must do more to improve their products, process, and services, thus customers will have fewer reasons for contacting the companies they buy from.
During his presentation at the CRM Association's annual conference Price offered seven ways to reduce customer contacts, all of which will help to decrease service costs and increase customer satisfaction.
1. Challenge the reasons customers contact you instead of just coping with them
Rushed agents, broken website links, product incompatibility, online error messages, and more. Companies need to eliminate the root cause, or causes, of service calls.
2. Create engaging self-service
Online and IVR self-service should be simple or compelling enough to encourage customer use. It should also deliver a success rate of at least 80 percent. That other 20 percent will likely end up as call to agents, which means that first contact resolution rates may be lower than you think.
3. Be proactive
If you have a service outage or see that a customer might overdraw their checking account or have some other issue that customers may contact you about, contact them first. Whether via phone call or email or SMS, giving customers advance notice will reduce inbound service contacts and related costs and boost customer satisfaction.
4. Make it easy for customers to contact you
Customers want to contact you on their terms. Take a multichannel approach to service, offering phone, email, website, SMS, and the like. Don't hide your phone number or URL; doing so frustrates customers and drives up dissatisfaction--and defection rates.
5. Own the actions across the company
Most customer call or emails to service centers, as well as most visits to self-service websites are "caused" by other areas of the company. Shipping and billing are two examples. Make executives from those areas "own" their problems and fix them. Charge the costs of servicing their issues to them, as well.
6. Listen and act on what customers are saying
Ask customers for their feedback and then take action on it.
7. Deliver great customer experiences
Add value to customers' service experiences. Educate your customers as well as service them. Resolve their issues during the first contact to avoid "snowballs" (i.e. unresolved issues that get worse with each contact).
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