Customers often don’t want to call the contact center. When they do, customers expect timely, accurate information. Repeat calls are an indicator of the health of your service organization and can be correlated to poor customer satisfaction and customer churn. Most analysts estimate repeat calls into the contact center can range between 15 to 35 percent. Ultimately, customer satisfaction and churn have a significant impact on your bottom line.
In order to ensure a positive customer experience, here are five actions to incorporate within your contact center, which helps eliminate repeat calls and decrease call volume:
1. Match the customer to the right agent with advanced skills based routing.
Understanding why the customer is calling and then routing the interaction to the right resource is critical to reducing repeat calls. If a customer’s concerns are not addressed appropriately or accurately, customers will ultimately become frustrated and increase the likelihood of repeat calls to resolve the same issue.
2. Analyze call volume by product/service line to determine repeat call drivers and improve training.
Learning from your customers is also vital to reducing repeat calls. By analyzing the reasons behind each customer call, adjustments can be made to training, FAQ’s and new customer welcome kits, while improving the overall customer experience.
3. Include education regarding the cause and effect of repeat calls in new hire training.
In general, employees want to be part of the solution and come to work with the expectation to provide exceptional service. Be sure to educate employees about the reasons for repeat calls and the associated costs. Make your employees part of the solution.
4. Uncover “hidden” concerns on every call.
In many cases, customers call with more than one issue. Unfortunately, cost-containment and overly rigid SLA policies rush the customer off of the phone. By allowing employees the ability to uncover “hidden” concerns, the customers experience is taken to a new level.
5. Leverage last-agent routing to discourage customers from shopping for an answer.
Customers have been known to call back if they don’t get the answer they want. For example, if an item is out of warranty, they may call several times until they find someone who will over-look the issue and provide warranty service. Last agent routing drives customers back to the person who last handled the call helping to influence appropriate customer behavior.
Find out more about Genesys Call Center & IVR products.