Thursday, August 14, 2008

REPEAT CALL ANALYSIS

There are many things you can do to avoid repeat calls, here are some ideas:

1. Ensure you achieve a reasonable service level so that callers do not have to wait in queue for too long and then abandon the call and have to call you back later. Apart from upsetting your customers, this distorts your true call volume and makes it very hard to know what your true call volume is.

2. Ensure your agents are adequately trained so that they provide the correct responses to callers and instill confidence in callers so that they do not feel the need to check-up, repeat or verify calls. Lack of confidence in the agent would result in many repeat calls that, again, would distort your call volume.

3. Ensure that all promised actions and follow-up activities are undertaken in a timely fashion so that callers do not have to chase up themselves because something has not happened.

4. Learn from your call types. Put in place mechanisms to identify the reason and drivers for calls (e.g., if customers are calling because another part of the organisation has failed, then this must be addressed). The call centre has a strategic role in the business and must help influence improvements thoughout. I heard that between 20-40% of calls in many centres are unnecessary for one reason or another – I am certain that all the resources we have to deal with this could be more productively used elsewhere!

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