Top Tips for Reducing Repeat Calls

We share some top tips for promoting contact avoidance and reducing repeat calls.

First Contact Resolution (FCR) is a continuing aspiration – research and advice span a decade of literature. When customers have to engage more than once about the same query, it drives a high level of repeat interactions.

This unnecessarily increases contact volumes and requires a higher staffing level, therefore increasing operational costs. Additionally, 1 in 10 customers will take their business elsewhere if they feel disappointed.

Our Solution Architects recommend that you consider contact avoidance, which ensures customers can appropriately self-serve and receive timely and relevant updates, therefore preventing or deflecting unnecessary contact.

Tried and trusted tips can also be a short cut or provide renewed inspiration.

Here is our pick of your peers’ top tips from our recent webinar.

• Require that at the end of the call the agent asks the customer if there are any remaining questions or if there are any other items that they need assistance with before ending the call.
• Listen to escalation calls and determine the breakdown point, analyse the root cause and then create remedial advice sheets or revise the processes, providing agents with new guidance.
• Email a satisfaction survey to the customer of any query marked ‘resolved’. Measure the service and match to your industry standards, review results daily during training sessions.

Our Solution Architects recommend that you identify reasons for repeat calls and whenever possible, eliminate the inefficiencies.

Further tips from the webinar include:

• Consider CLOSE – Contact, Listen, Object, Solve, Evaluate – conduct quality scores and check agent listening scores. Focusing attention on clearly understanding customer needs made a significant improvement to our FCR scores.
• Encourage agents to informally ‘contract’ with the customer to agree the expectations and their view of success for this call. For example, if the customer wants to achieve X, Y and Z, and the agent can only assist with X and Z, clarifying the situation and providing information about how the customer can achieve ‘Y’ right from the start significantly improves the potential for customer satisfaction.
• Use your webchat to monitor common questions and act as the driver for improving your website and deflecting transactional contacts.

Consistently improving results will support overall business unit productivity. It is important to solve a customer’s query on the first contact as it makes it easier for them to achieve their goals and reduces customer effort.

Acquiring customers costs between 4 and 10 times more than retaining customers (CIM Foundation). Satisfied customers are more likely to buy more and twice as likely to refer friends to your organisation.

For more information about Netcall, visit their website.

Author: Megan Jones