Do You Know Why Customers Are Calling?

Contact center agents are trained to be courteous, but using a pleasant voice means little to an angry mother when an order with guaranteed delivery doesn’t arrive in time for her daughter’s birthday. In such cases, consumers usually join other dissatisfied customers in closing their accounts.

Concerned by the spike in attrition, the VP of Operations asks the contact center director if she knows what might be causing the increase in account closures. After sifting through call recordings and interviewing agents, she finds examples of closed accounts due to billing errors, poor service, and late deliveries that appear to be driving account closures.

While this is just an example, it happens all the time. Many contact centers can’t automatically or systematically track and quantify the reasons people call. Verint Call Avoidance provides a cost-effective way to collect, analyze, and report this essential information. Businesses can establish categories—like billing errors, service issues, or delivery problems—to classify calls as they are processed.

The combination of quality monitoring and call avoidance automatically tags each call with one or more of these classifiers. Reports show trends for call reasons. Managers can retrieve calls from their desktop based on call type. For our contact center director above, delivery problems would have shown up as the biggest driver of calls—giving her guidance before she sat down to listen to a single call.

Besides problem solving, knowing precisely why people are calling allows contact center management to reduce costs and improve quality by:

• Redirecting more calls to self-service
• Improving the self-service interface
• Reducing the percentage of repeat calls
• Focusing quality monitoring on the most common call drivers

Knowing why people call makes it clear when new selections should be added to voice and web self-service menus. Simply adding “check delivery” as a menu choice for voice self-service or providing a tracking interface on the web site could be good options for the retailer. When it works, consumers actually prefer self-service.

Similarly, having this information helps reduce the incidence of repeat calls by focusing agent training on the reasons for repeat calls. Today, about 30% of all calls to the contact center are the result of questions not being answered on the first call. In the example, management could take several actions to help agents address delivery issues, from providing an instant messaging link to subject matter experts to providing agents with desktop access to shipping schedules. Finally, supervisors can select sample calls for review based on call type. This provides an assessment of how well remedies like training and coaching are working to resolve problem areas.