Exploring your Call Avoidance Strategy

A White Paper by Philip Augur

One of the key issues facing the contact centre-based customer service industry today is how to reduce transactional costs per contact, whilst at the same time achieving optimal return on each engagement.

Depending on which survey one reads, each telephone contact, productive or otherwise, costs an organisation upwards of £5.00. Similar costs are being asserted for email enquires, which, far from being the bright new thing it was hailed as, is now being viewed as a less than desirable paper contact in that it gives the customer free reign to make multiple demands.

Optimally then, in today’s contact centre access strategy mix, we are left with web contacts. Although many companies are far less transactional than they really could be, missing economies up for grabs in being so, if this approach is positioned correctly in the mix, it can achieve handling costs of a mere fraction of the above methods. It also therefore presents some very attractive savings indeed, whilst by the same virtue empowering the customer.

Although it may not seem obvious or even desirable at first glance, it is in many organisations’ interests to consider “upping the ante” when it comes to web activity (or, let’s call it, self service), effected in many ways through a process of avoiding the calls now handled at a somewhat costly basis for all parties through telephony. Clearly the advances in Voice Over IP enhance the practicalities and cost attractiveness yet further – the more you can target customers to hit your website for the usual, the easy and the more you can attract them to the call centre – for value add transactions, such as sales or renewals, the better. For everyone.

This paper will duly discuss how an organisation might explore avoiding call traffic they currently could, frankly, do without, and improve the service delivery for both its own requirements and those of the customer, enhancing their experience with the operation.

In assessing a strategic approach to Call Avoidance, it is worth spending a few moments considering the context within which calls are fundamentally generated. In choosing to make the call to any product or service provider, according to the ICMI (Incoming Calls Management Institute), there are seven factors of caller tolerance in terms of pursing an answer.

Whilst with any Call Avoidance Strategy, the objective is clearly not to send callers into the path of the competition i.e. increase the attractiveness of pursuit of substitutes through creating caller intolerance, the basis should be around optimising the service offering, thus avoiding necessity to call back again.


This context should be balanced with the ever-growing requirements of the customer in terms of excellent service delivery.

The dis-joint, clearly, is around calls that are generated, and in some volume, as a direct result of dis-satisfaction in respect of these quality requirements.

What is Call Avoidance?

Essentially, Call Avoidance is the promotion of optimum call handling, with the desired outcome achieved of right contact being handled by the right channel at the right time (in the most appropriate and cost efficient, customer focused manner).

Key call avoidance strategies, for example, finding out which customers call most frequently and why, play a major role in capacity planning and the handling of peak volumes. For example, a large number of callers from one customer group or of one brand origin might frequently complain about a particular product fault or service deficiency.

Rather than add more staff, invest in more technology to “more effectively” (through a knee jerk response) handle this large number of callers, the most cost-effective solution might be to eliminate the cause of the complaints, and therefore the calls themselves.

Another call avoidance strategy involves the use of other equally, if not more optimally appropriate customer channels such as the web which allow customers to electronically retrieve certain documents and information quickly, 24 hours a day, and without “the necessity” talking to a Call Centre Advisor. We’re back again to the glowing benefits of Self Service.

To continue with our framing of the context in which calls are generated that could and arguably really should easily be avoided, without compromising the integrity of the customer relationship, we examine briefly below the issue of quality and the attendant customer expectations it raises. The organisational impact of this is clear-cut in that, in each and every instance where a call handling transaction fails to achieve this accord is duly bears a risk (costly and reputation damaging) for further call generation.

Category types of calls to be avoided, and their symptoms

Repeat callers

/
  • The call was not one stop shopped
  • Something was incorrectly conveyed / transacted last time
  • The queue was too long / waiting time too unreasonable for caller to hold initially

Angry / frustrated callers /
  • Professional standards were not achieved last time
  • Something was incorrectly conveyed / transacted last time
  • The customer has been fobbed off / given the run around
  • No ownership has been taken

Complaining callers /
  • Promises have not been kept.
  • Service received (at whatever point, not simply in the call centre) was less than acceptable / desirable

“Trivial enquiry” callers / Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) /
  • No other efficient mechanism (often frustratingly so for the customer, who will not wish to be caught in the lobster trap of general traffic queuing when all they wish is for a simple answer to a simple question).

“Asked to call back” callers /
  • No efficient or effective call transfer methodology (or software configuration) is in practice.

“I want to speak to your supervisor” callers /
  • Unless this is turned around at the front line, this is symptomatic of cultural inhibitors, itself generating call volumes, where front line staff are not empowered, nor sufficiently confident, and have not demonstrated capability in call control / directing the conversation.

It is important that any attempts to identify and rectify root causes of the need for customer to make contact should not purely involve the contact centre. Whilst they will be the recipients of the vast majority of contacts, they are the least likely department to generate the need for the contact, and as such other functions need to be involved in any structured attempt to reduce the number of customer contacts.

By this, I refer for example to the role of marketing here in addressing the outcomes of root cause analysis going forward, in addition to fundamentally influencing the choice of distribution channels opted for by a customer, thereby by design either generating, substituting or avoiding calls in targeted preference for another media.

Complementary to this multilateral approach is the role of case ownership, thus again avoiding call generation otherwise unavoidable into the Contact Centre traffic streams.

HOW TO BUILD YOUR ANALYSIS

  • Construct detailed customer lifecycle chart, identifying all potential instances where they may make contact.
  • Identify what activity generates the need for the contact, and who within the business is responsible for this area.
  • Explore whether the contact can be
  • Avoided
  • Diverted
  • Handled via another channel
  • Automated
  • Out bounded
  • Self-served
  • Re-focused
  • Encouraged

OK, SO THAT’S THE THEORY, WHAT ABOUT THE “DOING”?

Typical steps undertaken in a Call Avoidance Programme

  • From outset, ensure that the team focusing on the above points has representation from all relevant business units, ranging from marketing to product development, from HR to finance.
  • Ensure that thorough web functionality accompanies this initiative – an audit here may reveal for example the need to reposition web activity to front of house and provide fully transactional self -service for your customer base.
  • There is a need to create a specific “call avoidance” KPI, as pure volume alone is unrepresentative and clearly front-loaded toward the Contact Centre environment. This should duly span all business units with every department having responsibility – an example could be “Calls Per Customer Per Quarter”.
  • In order to measure the success of any call avoidance initiative, it is important to have a solid understanding of all current call drivers. If no system generated call reason codes are available, a five-bar gate paper exercise is sufficient to gain an understanding. This will require control, discipline and a clear communication plan around the importance of the data being captured by the Contact Centre advisors.
  • The next logical stage is to categorise contacts into sub groups, depending on their relative value to the organisation (such as “revenue enhancing”, “revenue damaging”, “cost neutral” etc).
  • The focus hereon should be to direct call avoidance efforts on the least attractive categories first, as a priority for attention.
  • As an outcome, appropriate calibration of the sub-categories enables the running of multiple initiatives in parallel, maintaining the ability to measure the impact of each one independently or indeed collectively.

I have in the above suggested an outline blueprint for taking forward a call avoidance strategy in its key phases of review, design and, ultimately, implementation.

I would stress however is that this is very much a blueprint and may need adapting toward specific contextual requirements in terms of the organisational environment.

I encourage you to explore these realistic methods to both optimise your transaction costs and add value to your customer experience.

Copy-write: Philip N. Augur 2005.

About the author

Phil has amassed 18 years experience in the call / contact centre industry, leading major, sector spanning organisations through extensive change programmes and CRM initiatives.

He has been engaged as a consultant and interim manager to enterprises of varying size and complexity where he has programme-managed reviews, design phases and implementations of UK and offshore based contact centre transformations.

Having also worked with the UK’s leading BPO provider for a number of years, Phil has close affiliations with the CCA and CCMA and is a regular speaker on the industry events circuit.

Phil provides bespoke consulting services to Service Awakenings and can be contacted at 07778 005116