Saana Borgström Customer contact numbers are growing significantly and bringing many challenges to companies – failure demand being one of the most significant factors in the increase in contact numbers.
In this article I will tell in more detail how Customer Contact Intelligence with failure demand analysis can help companies reduce the number of unnecessary customer contacts – while increasing efficiency and improving their customer experience.
Identify, analyse and improve
First I’ll give you the bad news: there is no silver bullet to reduce the amount of failure demand (=unnecessary contacts) coming in your contact centre. Failure demand is not a problem caused or fixed by contact centres. It is a problem of the whole organisation and it should be treated as such.
The good news is identifying failure demand from your customer contacts helps to draw a map to the real operational level problems that need to be solved in order to provide the service your customers really want and need. This is the ultimate key to resolving the issue of ever-increasing number of contacts from growing.
Identifying and acting upon failure demand requires
- categorising your customer contacts (from all channels) either as failure or value demand
- analysing the content of the contacts to discover the root-cause of the issues
- connecting those issues to the correct service, product, channel, customer segment, location, etc.
- identifying the owner of those issues
- connecting the data from the contact analysis with relevant business metrics to monitor the impact of the development actions
Now, you might be thinking that “we get thousands of customer contacts from each channel per week and we have 5 service channels altogether. How on earth are we going to analyse these contacts on top of doing all the other things we need to do?”
Well, if the analysis is done manually it WILL take months.
The other option is to use Aiwo that has developed special AI to automate the analysis and the connection to business metrics. This saves a remarkable amount of time and gives the opportunity to head right into planning, executing and monitoring the development actions.
Don’t just do things better – strive to do better things
So what can companies learn from a comprehensive analysis of their customer contacts including failure demand categorising? What more does it bring than evaluating the NPS or CSAT -scores?
At its best, Customer Contact Intelligence offers an eye-opening opportunity to evaluate the internal efficiency of a company through the eyes of the customer. The following examples are the kind of operational level problems contact analysis helps identifying, analysing and improving – some of which might be completely hidden from the organisation.
- Interaction within the organisation: sales promotions or refunds are not communicated with the financial team
- Process failures: quality assurance is overlooked in development
- Partner cooperation: cooperation with a certain subcontractor does not meet the quality standards
- Insufficient orientation for call centre personnel: lack of understanding the product/service
- Maintaining competence: staff turnover brings gaps in the level of competence
- Customer insights are not shared throughout the organisation: the development team does not get enough information about the customer problem their new feature should solve
- Conflicting leadership tools: Reward models for sales personnel focus on closing the deals instead of increasing customer life-time value
The great benefit of the Aiwo analysis is that it also visualises the cost impact of these operational level issues by showing the direct costs of the contacts related to them. Knowing the volume and the cost of the customer contacts about these issues makes prioritising development actions much more focused, faster and efficient.
Let’s face it. There is only so much the customer service personnel can do to decrease the total number of customer contacts when the root cause of the contacts lie somewhere in the operational level. They can optimise ie. for speed if required, but that’s a fool’s errand in the long run.
Like Peter Drucker has said: there is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.
Join the early-movers
The data-driven transformation has already been seen in marketing and revenue management. Next it will happen for customer experience. The pioneers have already adopted this data-driven approach and have started to analyse and aggregate their customer interaction data with their operational and financial data.
Aiwo is the fastest solution to achieve these business benefits without an expensive and long-lasting IT-project. Book a time for a free demo to see our analytics dashboard in action or try our customer contact cost calculator to visualise your annual contact costs and their savings potential.