I attended the Call Centre and Service Management Expo at the NEC a couple of months ago and have been meaning to write this post ever since. It was a very interesting event from our perspective, we’re not a call centre, and can’t offer call centre software (which most of the vendors did). Nevertheless, we stood proudly with our channel shift message “Death of the Call Centre” the summation of how to drive your customers to the most cost effective channel by improving customer engagement and maximising efficiency. Although, it didn’t go down to well with the other vendors, it drummed up quite a bit of conversation with the delegates.
I’m not pretending to be an expert in call centres, I’m very much not. But, by packaging up calls in a certain way it makes it much easier to ascertain where savings can be made. Take the graph below instance:
The graph shows the degree of involvement needed by the customer on the y axis against the involvement needed by human interaction on the x axis. By human interaction I mean the complexity needed by a person to deal with a customer’s query. The degree of customer interaction is defined by how well they feel the business would best deal with their query. E.g. a customer who has received bad service, tried to sort this out on numerous occasions, is going to have to be dealt with over the phone and by a human who is able to both deal with the issue and communicate this effectively. That type of call is destined for the high/high interaction.
I have highlighted the area in the bottom left (blue) where customer and human interaction are low. This is where a query could just as easily be answered on the web by simply offering up that information on web pages, by FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) or even webchat. On first inspection this only covers a small percentage of the chart but arguably these types of calls are generally the majority. Nevertheless, we’re not talking about totally closing down call centres; there will always be times where customers need to be able to talk to a human being and for effective customer service there should always be the option of multiple touch points.
It’s about making the most cost effective touch point the channel of choice for your customers and for the majority of the time that will be online. I’ll discuss this further in a future post.
Moving to the most effective channel
It is here, where the opportunity for channel migration reveals itself. If we can get those low involvement/low human customers to shift to the web, you’re looking at considerable savings. The below diagram describes the costs associated with customers using different channels:
For the public sector the cost shift from face-2-face (£8.21), to telephone (£3.21) and then to web (£0.39)can create savings of up to 95%.
We’re not talking about reduced service provision or taking the human aspect out of the equation. If anything we’re it’s about the benefit of self-serve; customers being able to solve their query online, whenever they want 24/7 and without the need for the phone.
So what sort of services would these be? In the public sector and more specifically local authorities, it’s going to be about making the services that can be or are online as effective as possible. This will ensure that citizens can transact without the need for contact by other means. By effective I don’t mean just putting the process online, the process needs to be an end-to-end solution which is then wholly online.
So there you have it; try looking at how you can migrate your customers to a more cost efficient and possibly more effective channel, than simply making your call centre leaner. What are your thoughts?
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